It has several pitot tubes, but if they all have a common fault and fail at the same time, you’re left with nothing. You can fly without reference to airspeed though.
I read a great book by Dr. Nuland called “How We Die”, and the author describes the random murder of a little girl. The author tries to analyze what was going through the girl’s mind as she was dying and from a medical standpoint, he opined that in violent deaths, the human body releases a plethora of chemicals which allow our frail brains to be at ease with what is happening to us. This is not to say that a violent death would be pleasant; it isn’t. However, I do agree with the author that the human body is too marvelous a machine to just let us experience and process head-on the violence that is being inflicted upon us. I can’t remember the name of the chemical process, but there is a certain amount of peace and ease which comes along with a violent death. Think of it as “nature’s heroin”, something that helps us deal with the trauma…be it a horrific airplane crash, a stabbing death, the whole nine yards. The same can be said of all mammals when they are eaten or something else violent happens.
I think about this when I picture people who have had severe trauma happen to them which causes them to expire.
It is one thing for your brain to block out physical pain and trauma. There is a lot of evidence of people who are severely injured not really feeling their injuries at the time they occurred.
In this case though the passengers are not experiencing phsyical trauma byt mental trauma. The physical trauma at the end, when they hit the water, was probably mercifully short. It was the three minutes of terror prior to that which would have sucked and I doubt most people’s brains protect them from it.
LSLGuy, a Doper and a large commercial jet pilot, posted the following in another thread. You can see the people on board were not blissfully unaware but rather losing their shit…sometimes literally.
I do agree with what you are saying. My post was just meant to illustrate what would happen at a violent end…physical trauma. I doubt there is anything that can comfort us during times of great psychological distress…such as the time it takes for a plane to crash from the sky to the earth/ocean. It’s really too bad. In ancient times, humans never had to deal with technology, just physical pain.
Huh? Psychological distress is the same whether it’s during the 3 minutes it takes for your plan to fall out of the sky or the 3 minutes it takes for a bear to finish mauling you.
Horrible and sad. For me, personally, I always thought (hoped) that the “nature’s heroin” was going on when one animal eats another. The “victim” animal usually looks so accepting (I’m thinking of an antelope/lion thing here) that I hope that this is indeed the case.
With people, it is always the exact opposite w/ me. Perhaps I think of desperately trying to imagine tortorous violence way too much. [Too many Auschwitz victims in my family…]
Now let’s get back to our zany thread, shall we?
My phone (transmitting radios disabled, of course!) worked just fine as a GPS receiver when pressed against a window. I was actually a bit surprised that it showed the correct 500+ mph and 30k+ feet; for one thing, I wouldn’t think the software would get much testing in this regime; and for another, I thought I read that GPS units were supposed to disable themselves under these conditions for some anti-terrorism nonsense. Anyway–they do work if they can get a reasonable line-of-sight through non-conductive material.
IIRC the limits are 60,000 feet altitude and 999 mph for most civilian GPSs. Obviously, better ones are available but they’re regarded as munitions by the US Department of State and fall under ITAR. GPS’s are being used by amateurs for high altitude balloon trips, BTW. I’ve heard people hitting as much as 110,000 feet in altitude, so maybe the rules changed. I don’t know.
