A lot depends on the particular airplane. Some actually do have spaces where you can avoid being crushed. Some do not. Personally, I don’t know which ones are which.
There’s usually only one way to find out…
In the BA flight, the legs of the individual were still inside the plane, so he was sort of hokked on like that. He wasn’t clinging on with his hands.
There’s probably also a sense in which an excited mob will do things that no calm individual would think of trying.
Exactly - they’re the ones who are currently eligible to get on flights at all, when there are flights. But, aside from that, the average Afghan is, I’d say, certainly well aware that planes are different to buses.
“Suicide” to me implies planning and an intent to die. Acting in desperation, especially within a mob that are also doing that, is not the same thing even when it also results in death.
Replying to myself - it seems at least one group of Afghani refugees did effectively force a U.S. Air Force plane to evacuate them, leading to a single C-17 evacuation flight with a record setting 823 evacuees on board.
The C-17, using the call sign Reach 871, was not intending to take on such a large load, but panicked Afghans who had been cleared to evacuate pulled themselves onto the C-17’s half-open ramp, one defense official said.
Instead of trying to force those refugees off the aircraft, “the crew made the decision to go,” a defense official told Defense One …
I wonder if the poor optics of letting the earlier stowaways die changed military orders on how to handle these people.
It was probably not so much “letting the earlier stowaways die” as “unaware someone was attempting to his in a wheel well” or “unaware anyone was attempting to hang onto the airplane as it left the ground”
One assigns malice, the other does not.
Now that they’ve reached over 70,000 evacuated, I wonder if some of the refugees are simply fleeing future oppression, rather than having a specific fear of retribution for their involvement with the US military. (Especially the ones outside the airport who still have not gotten in.) Also, when we consider the speed with which the Afghan government capitulated, many people outside Kabul are trapped. Whether the new government decides to allow such people to leave or not, the current local roadblocks are manned by hillbillies with rifles who have limited education, have spent 20-plus years fighting and are in a less forgiving mood, and are unlikely to be disciplined for taking revenge on US sympathizers they find. To be fair, the central command seems to be willing to cooperate with the Americans and let at-risk Afghans leave - they just appear to have limited control over all Taliban factions.
Considering that until recently, the previous US administration’s policy and its minions made a (successful) effort to block every SIV application, the current evacuation has proceeded with astounding speed.
The episode that leads to the OP happened when there were minimal troops at the airport since they expected to be in friendly territory for the time, so the mob overwhelmed them. With the extra troops now deployed, then have established a perimeter and internal order so nobody is jumping onto aircraft exteriors.
That only works if she’s attractive enough though.
I’m impressed the airplane was able to supply enough oxygen for the breathing needs of the 600 or 823 Afghans. It probably never was meant to do that many.
Don’t forget there are land crossings into other countries - Pakistan, for instance, relaxed some of it’s border controls for at least two major crossing points. The airlift is getting all the media attention, but over the years tens of thousands have left Afghanistan by road, and thousands still are doing so.
I’m assuming the C-17 pressurizes air the same way commercial aircraft do - not by carrying oxygen but by concentrating the outside air. If the interior is set up to hold pressure then supplying the needed air would be no problem. It may not be quite as good as that on a commercial carrier, but if the refugees are a bit loopy from not quite enough oxygen it’s unlikely to hurt them and it’s not like they’re flying the airplane or otherwise operating heavy machinery.
This sort of airlift isn’t something done routinely, it’s an emergency situation, and much is less than ideal. The important thing is that there is enough air to sustain life, which there is. If there was a big issue with this I’m sure we’d hear about it.
Under normal circumstances, the Globemaster can hold 134 troops and cruise for hours at normal airliner altitudes. The interior is surely pressurized and ventilated to the same standard as commercial airliners, or you’d end up with sick/dead troops (and cockpit crew) by the time you landed.
I have no idea how much extra ventilation the HVAC system could provide for 600 refugees, by when dealing with confined spaces, the limiting problem isn’t usually hypoxia, it’s hypercapnia (too much CO2). After Apollo 13 broke, the astronauts had enough O2 to get home, but they famously had to engineer a way to scrub the CO2 out of their air; had they not been able to do that, they would have died of hypercapnia before splashdown.
This video (started at 88 seconds) shows that there’s no pressure dome separating the flight deck from the cargo deck:
One would hope so, but if the C17 has a slightly lower interior pressure than a commercial airliner that shouldn’t be a problem for healthy military folks (commercial planes pressurized to somewhere between the equivalent of 5000 and 8000 feet altitude, but healthy adults usually don’t see adverse effect until over 10,000.
You are correct about the CO2 but the sheer volume of air in the interior should help mitigate that. We’re talking about a large volume of space for a few hours, not days in a small tin can.
In any case, it’s being empirically demonstrated that this is possible, so obviously this is being done somehow.
The Gremlin was actually the most believable part of that movie.