In regards to the OP, I don’t believe it’s impossible for a 150 lb human to partially freeze in the low pressure/temperature contions that would exist at 30,000 feet. Even if they didn’t freeze solid, the outer cm of flesh could easily do so in that time, and given the tendency for people (not simply news reporters) to sensationalize reports that would be reported as having frozen solid, whether it was a solid-to-the-core freezing or not.
Just my haypenny, but no bullshit flags here.
I presume he meant to say “at the time of the crash.”. I don’t think we need a highly trained coroner to announce that people had circulation at the time of their death, do we?
Two things.
Wearing the masks means using the oxygen, it is a limited supply.
Wearing the masks full time is as practical and useful as requiring automobile drivers to wear fullface helmets when going for a 10 hour drive.
The current system is a good one. Obviously it could be better. I don’t believe that wearing masks fulltime would make it better.
Well, if the first six bodies to be autopsied were all alive at the time of the crash, that certainly seems to refute the claim that the bodies were frozen. Still very puzzling and disturbing. I didn’t realize that depressurization resulted in unconsciousness so quickly; does anyone know why?
In other news, a Venezuelen plan crashed, probably killing all 158 aboard. A coincidence, but still unsettling to have two major plane crashes within days of each other.
Not as much as you might think. Humans are not all equaly affected by low oxygen levels, some may pass out more readily than others. Mt. Everest is 29,000 feet and people have climbed it without supplimental oxygen. The crew shouldn’t have passed out if they put their masks on quickly but that is provided their oxygen system was working correctly.
I’d cut the guy some slack, given that, if he speaks English and that quote wasn’t translated, it’s probably his second language.
Just as an aside, I spent many years doing aerial mapping and worked two, four flights in the summer time with much of it above 12,000 feet AGL ( Above ground level ) for an actual altitude of 13-15K Did it while smoking , no oxygen used etc. I do have oversized lungs which helped I’m sure but many mapping pilots worked those altitudes without being on oxygen all day. You do become used to it and as was said, each person is quite different.
I do wonder how they think the auto-pilot system was not on if the plane flew for about an hour before crashing? If a third person was still moving and trying to get oxygen to the pilots, I wonder how close they were to being incapacitated?
You can remain alive, even if unconscious on a lot less oxygen than you might think and also they may ave had heart pumping and all but have been near brain dead or sever damage for a long time after passing out or being near frozen.
We need lots more info on this as it has too many questions un-answered as of yet IMO.
YMMV
As the facts involved in the crash trickle out, there seems to be a tragic/comic series of events. The latest: An out of work pilot takes a job as back-up personnel on the same flight to be close to his stewardess girlfriend. They are the ones who are seen on video trying to seize control of the plane. The co-pilot is seen slumped over the console. 
WHat? Where did you get that from?
My god, that would make a hell of a sad story though. 
Don’t see anything funny about it. Then again, I like my humor in the toilet. Heh.
So…what? An attempted hijacking/plane theft that went wrong when the out of work pilot shoots a crewman, the bullet passes through the body and out a window resulting in depressurization? The pilot himself loses consciousness rapidly leaving his stewardess accomplice, a native of The Andes, to steer for a brief time until she runs out of gas?
Good story, but where’s all the Greek sex?
Climbers don’t go straight from sea level to the summit of Everest; they spend at least a month going progressively higher to acclimate their bodies and build up red blood cells. I suspect even Ed Viesturs would have a hard time dealing with abrupt depressurization like that.
I still don’t get it, but then I’m not very bright;
A person should be able to go at least half a minute without oxygen; I can hold my breath for a full minute even if I exhale first. Why would depressurization cause you to lose consciousness so quickly?
If there was a problem with your oxygen supply then half a minute isn’t going to help you very much. There are many warnings to tell the pilots there’s a problem with the pressurisation system, you can be sure they tried to use their oxygen masks. What we don’t know yet is why they didn’t work.
As to how it could keep flying if it wasn’t the autopilot, a properly trimmed commercial aircraft at cruise altitude and speed is inherently stable.
This one is gona be a tricky one to figure out – it sems that the reports over the first day-and-a-half are a mishmash of hearsay soundbites. CVRs are mostly useless in these cases because they just loop the last 30 minutes anyway (c’mon, we surely now have the digital technology to record a whole flight door-closed-to-door-open?), and the reports are that the CVR got ruined. Depending on the FDR model used we may know when the catastrophic failure happened.
I dunno about this but a lot of people are gonna be asking for one of the pilots to be masked full time. The average person does not have that much time under real explosive-D circumstances to take action effectively.
You’d probably save more lives by having all passengers wear five point harnesses, seat facing backwards, and wear helmets.
Remember that what we don’t hear about are the decompression incidents that don’t result in accidents.
Decompression accidents are uncommon. I would be surprised if any major changes came out of this accident.
RickJay,
In a decompression incident you don’t always know that decompression has taken place. Time from knowledge of a problem, to loss of consciousness can be very quick. Also you most likely won’t have just taken a nice big breath, chances are your last breath was 5 seconds ago and it was a relaxed shallow one. One more point, your oxygen levels are probably a little lower to start with because you are already operating at the equivelant of 8,000 feet above sea level.
One thing I remember being drummed into in my Human Factors course was that hypoxia is insidious, with effects like that of being drunk. That is - it impairs your ability to recognise you are impaired.
WAG - Maybe a slower decompression at first impaired the pilots ability to recognise the reduction in cabin pressure and led them to assume it was an air conditioning problem, which the aircraft was reported as having days earlier.
ouryL is noting that this resembles the premise of the great comedy Airplane! Which, alas, it does.
About the people living thing… the fact that a few people were alive when the plane hit the ground doesn’t really refute the freezing story, it just means that the freezing didn’t kill everyone immediately.
Because you can’t hold your breathe when it happens.
At the time of sudden decompression, there will be a pressure differential of several pounds between the air inside your lungs and the now suddenly less ambient pressure around you. The air inside you is sucked out.
It is well established that, at the altitudes reported in this accident, your “useful conciousness” is only 10-15 seconds, and for most of that time you will NOT be functioning anywhere near full capacity.
People vary enormously in their tolerance to high altitudes. At 30,000 feet, someone with chronic heart or lung problems may die very quickly indeed since they’re already operating in a marginal fashion. Someone accustomed to living at 10,000 feet above sea level will do slightly better than someone who has spent all their life at sea level. A certain number of people will also suffer symptoms of the bends at such a sudden pressure change, and the bends can also cause damage or be fatal very quickly.
Add in the cold. Now, the temperatue will drop immediately both from cold air entering and from the fact that an expanding gas (in this case, the internal atmosphere of the airplane) cools as it expands. As they continued at high altitude, now exposed directly to outside air, the interior of the airplane continued to cool. Temperatures at 30,000 feet can easily be 40 below zero even during a summer day - much colder than your home freezer. Unconcious people don’t move and thus generate little heat, and the lack of oxygen would further inhibit metabolic heat generation. This will actually protect the brain for a little while against damage from low oxygen, but only for a little while. Meanwhile, the outer skin and extremities are freezing.
People may not have been dead, but a lot of them were deeply unconcious with major physical damage before they hit, perhaps fatally injured already from lack of oxygen and cold damage.
And a couple other small items:
First of all, above a certain altitude it IS required that pilots wear their masks, espeically if one pilot has to leave the cockpit and there is only one guy on duty. I don’t recall that exact altitude, maybe one of our resident airline captains will weigh in on the matter. (I’m rather surprised we haven’t seen one pop up yet, maybe they’re all at work right now)
Also - in normal operations the airplane draws in air from the outside an concentrates it. So the air you breathe in an airplane at cruise isn’t stored somewhere aboard, it’s drawn from outside, thickened up, warmed, and then you breathe it.