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Qantas maintenance fills oxygen tanks with nitrogen
Yikes. Apparently someone misread the "oxygen" cart in Melbourne and Qantas technicians have been filling oxygen tanks with nitrogen. You know, the oxygen tanks that supply the air to your masks in an emergency? Those oxygen tanks.I'm reminded of that first scene Mission Impossible II where Sean Ambrose knocks out the entire plane with special gas and they fly it into a mountain side as they parachute to safety below.
What's worse is that they're not sure how many planes this error was affected by. While it might be easy to track down Qantas flights that were incorrectly loaded, their maintenance teams are also contracted out to other carriers that fly through Melbourne.
Nothing like adding to insult to injury in an emergency. "In addition to the plane spiraling out of control towards the Pacific Ocean, we've filled the oxygen tanks with nitrogen! Ha!"
Filed under: Australia, Airlines, Transportation, Airports, News
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
kouiskas Dec 16th 2007 12:12PM
It's Australia, not Austria. And Qantas, not Quantas...
Stephan Wilkinson Dec 19th 2007 9:50PM
It would help if people who wrote blogs of this sort knew even the tiniest thing about actual aircraft operations. (I'm a pilot.) In the first place, what was being refilled was not the supply for all those passenger oxygen masks that drop out of the overhead if there's an emergency, it was the cockpit-masks source of emergency oxygen.
In the second place, the few aircraft that were affected had their tanks topped up, not refilled. If a crew-supply tank is depleted in any way, even partially, it is replaced, not refilled, with a bottle that has been filled from a secure source, not a rampside cart. Which means that here and there a tank 90 or 95 percent full of oxygen because of inevitable minor leakage was replenished with a bit of nitrogen. The air you and I breathe is already 78 percent nitrogen, so that's not the end of the world, despite what the Melbourne doctor said under the assumption that empty tanks were being refilled with nitrogen.
After all, what does he know? He's an excellent doctor but a lousy airline pilot.