6/30/2023 0 Comments Oxygen charge 1![]() ![]() One of the most well-known crashes involving hypoxia was the 1999 crash of a Learjet that lost cabin pressure and flew halfway across the country on autopilot before running out of gas and crashing in a South Dakota pasture, killing professional golfer Payne Stewart and five others. “There’s quite a few, over the years, pressurization-issue accidents that look very similar to that type of behavior,” he said. Waldock said the plane likely ran out of fuel, given its rapid descent and the lack of a very large fire at the crash site. “That’s definitely something that investigators will be looking into,” Brickhouse said.įlight tracking sites showed the plane suffered a rapid spiraling descent, dropping at one point at a rate of more than 30,000 feet (9,144 meters) per minute before crashing in the St. He said it’s possible the pilot was disoriented and may have “tried to reprogram a flight computer or something like that.” Plus, there likely would have been other damage to the plane, which kept flying.īrickhouse, the other Embry-Riddle professor, said that aircraft are often set to fly on autopilot “so if the pilot goes hypoxic or loses consciousness, that aircraft is just going to fly whatever route it was programmed to fly,” he said.īrickhouse said it’s unclear why the plane suddenly turned around in New York and headed south again. If it had, the interior windows would have frosted over from quickly changing pressure at 34,000 feet. The fact that the pilot could be seen through the windows could mean that the aircraft did not have a “catastrophic” pressurization failure, Waldock said. But it kind of depends on what kind of autopilot system the aircraft had.” “The turn (away from New York and back south) is a little perplexing. “It went up to 34,000 feet and basically stayed there - all the way up, all the way back,” Waldock said. “By far the most likely suspect is some sort of a pressurization issue,” said William Waldock, a professor of safety science who teaches aircraft accident investigation at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Arizona. before crashing in Virginia, k illing the pilot and three passengers. Once over Long Island, it inexplicably turned around and headed south, flying straight over Washington, D.C. The Cessna Citation took off from Elizabethton, Tennessee, headed for Long Island’s MacArthur Airport. But federal investigators are just beginning to look for answers, and experts cautioned against jumping to conclusions. (AP) - A loss of oxygen is a leading theory for why an unresponsive business jet flew off course and over the nation’s capital Sunday before it crashed in rural Virginia. ![]()
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