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Comment by jwildeboer | Hacker News Reader

Not turbulence related. Plane (Boeing 787-9) lost instrumentation according to the captain, followed by rapid loss of altitude. When instrumentation came back, flight continued to a safe landing. 12 people were sent to hospital. S always, see avherald.com for the most reliable, non-speculative info.

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I disagree, the physics of large planes make extreme movements on the plane's z-axis like this via just it's control surfaces near impossible. All the control surfaces can really do is tilt the plane, which in absolute terms will change verticality but relative to the plane is still a longitudinal acceleration. The only thing that can overwhelm the momentum of something with the mass of a small building fast enough to cause injury like this is turbulence.

That being said having the plane lose instruments from the turbulence is a major problem that needs to be fixed

Edit: Rereading the article I did notice a passenger comment about the plane going in a nosedive, which would match the scenarios the others below me have replied with that dont involve turbulence. Always thought the airframe couldn't survive actively maneuvering at such extremes on big jets like that, guess I was wrong.

You can induce multiple Gs when pushing hard enough. Negative Gs and everything and everyone not strapped in flies into the ceiling. Which then must at some point come down.

Injuries from first crashing headfirst into the ceiling and then out of control falling back into your chair is a given when you have hundreds of passengers on board.

Especially on a Boeing which does not limit the flight envelope like an Airbus does.

People have averted hijackings by using sudden movements to whip the hijackers around the cabin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Express_Flight_705

Daaaamn. Dude put the DC-10 through its paces.

You will get negative G when your flight path is "steeper" than the parabolic trajectory you would get traced out by a ballistic object at the same height and speed.

That's how we can get the zero-G flights - by precisely flying the parabola.

Let's rephrase that as, this is the story as relayed by one of the passengers to RNZ. If non-speculative info is what you're after, perhaps it's better to wait for the official report.

The captain has been quoted with that info of loss of instrumentation and that is on the avherald page. Avherald is quite known for only handing out vetted information, so I do trust this to be true.

From what I've read - a person is claiming the captain said. The captain himself hasn't explicitly admitted to anything yet.

There's always a judgement call regarding how skeptical to be about others' claims.

Sounds like you and GP are just drawing the line at different places.

This is what avherald writes in their report (as of now, 2024-03-11 14:20 CET): "The captain later said they had briefly lost their instrumentation, then it came back all of the sudden."

Link: https://avherald.com/h?article=51601631&opt=0

>there was blood at the ceiling

>it came back all of the sudden

top quality writing there..

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