"....preliminary report now makes clear that discharge from the lower part of the bottle blew open the fuselage and propelled the main part of the bottle upward. The bottle burst through the main deck, making a hole 20 centimeters (8 in.) in diameter, then hit a door frame, a door handle and the overhead paneling before falling back out of the aircraft, leaving parts of the valve behind.
The implication is that, by a stroke of bad luck, the bottle had managed to escape through the two holes it had already made and then dropped into the sea—and is therefore unavailable for inspection."
Valujet Flight 592 was carrying several pyrotechnic oxygen generators as cargo, was it not? This is what we understood in UK about it.
"....and is therefore unavailable for inspection." How convenient for 'them' and frustrating for 'us'.
Prost is right but standardisation is a good thing. The less confusion the better off - and safer, aviation will be.
Uh, "is therefore unavailable for inspection" is no longer really true.
It might be expensive to do so, but given GPS and a good estimate of the time of failure, it should be possible to find an oxygen bottle on the bottom of an ocean, because you don't have to drag the whole ocean.
Mike Halloran: Good idea in theory. We were fishing Findhorn Bay in Scotland and found a WWII tank on the sounder (they used this place for practicing the D-Day Landings - lots died there!). We immediately marked it and subsequently failed to find it again. Right! We were inept, no doubt but, still, a bloody tank, of all thing! The ocean is a BIG place even when you think you know where you are. Wanna try? I'll come with you!
Even if the water is shallow, you can have trouble finding it--a heli went into Lake of the Ozarks, in Missouri in 2008 (a man made lake whose waters are 'murky'); they knew exactly where it went in, because there were witnesses nearby. Took authorities 2 days to find it. I didn't hear otherwise--wouldn't there have been some sort of transponder or GPS like locator? I can imagine you multiply the severity of the problems they encountered in a shallow but murky lake by 1000 when you try to find something at the bottom of a deep ocean.
It all depends on who is doing the looking. The ocean IS a big place. Even a lake can be pretty big for local law enforcement to search. But our navy has some pretty advanced magnetometers and other equipment that can find modern mines. These have no more ferrous material in them than the missing O2 bottle.
The state of the art in minesweeping is classified (I'd guess). In fact, they may NOT want to go looking for this item, given that the success/failure of their search might reveal the limitations of their technology.
