Pilot 1: Damn! The engines are failing!
Pilot 2: Do you see anywhere to land?
Pilot 1: Negative, no viable areas. Losing altitude!
Pilot 2: Wait! Over there, there’s a huge vat of liquid! Maybe if we angle it in…
Pilot 1: Angling in!
Pilot 2: We’re coming in too fast!
Pilot 1: Wait, that’s not quite liquid.
Pilot 2: What? What do you mean?
Pilot 1: I think that’s a sewage plant!
Pilot 2: Shit.
Pilot 1: Exactly!
::sploosh::
Yes, I know, small plane, one pilot. The conversation wasn’t nearly as interesting that way, though.
Actually, I remember some poor skydiver dieing when he landed in a sewage treatment “pond” in the DC area. This would have been in the 1990-1991 time frame.
That’s pretty close to where I live. They were three Japanese nationals who “had come to this country to learn how to fly”, apparently. I hope they died on impact, rather than drowning in the nasty sludge.
Well, that’s one bit of good news anyway. There’s no way anyone could have survived that twisted wreckage, so at least their lungs were effluvium-free before they died. Still, what a way to go.
The medical examiner is going to have fun with that one.
Foreign student pilots come to U.S. and crash planes into things. Seems like I heard that one before. Luckily, they greatly overestimated how far the splash would go and the neighborhood was spared. Operation Hiroshita they dubbed it.
Y’know, a lawyer I know and I have this theory that a lot of the things that are published in NTSC accident-investigation transcripts as “(unintelligible)” or “(garbled)” are actually the pilots being, um, specially expressive about exactly how they feel about the situation…
In high school my chemistry class went on a field-trip to the municipal sewage treatment plant (worst field trip ever). We got to walk across the catwalks over the enormous, swimming-pool-sized tanks of poo. The place smelled exactly how you’d expect. And at periodic intervals along the catwalk, they had…life preservers. Like these. In case you fell into the vat of raw sewage.
No one had the nerve to ask if they’d ever had to use them, but the general consensus amongst my classmates was that it may well be better to die than to live knowing that you nearly drowned in sewage.
There wouldn’t be enough showers … you’d never feel clean again. shudder
Hey, that reminds me of the doper that used the shitty Jacuzzi. Who was that again?
By the way, did they even bother to recover the wreckage or bodies or was it like "I ain’t going in there! They’re dead they won’t care. We can just throw a couple of wreaths of flowers on there for the families, that’ll be fine. ".
I was curious so I did a search, it was Happy Lendervedder. That was almost a year ago. Apologies to Happy for bringing it up, if the memories were finally starting to fade.
They had some footage of the wreck on the morning news. If they wanted to land a plane in the tank, they couldn’t have aimed it much better. The tank’s been drained now, and the plane is quite simply all busted up. There was a lump of airplane about the size of a minibar fridge on the edge of the tank by the railing, and everything wlse was torn apart and wadded up in the tank.
It’s definitely going to be a challenge to sort out what happened. The Beech (bottom picture) they were in is a decently forgiving airplane that can tolerate a fair amount of clumsy piloting, so it should be difficult to push it into an unrecoverable spin, slip or stall.
