Originally posted by Freeman
Thing is, if it crashed it crashed in the ocean, is it possible to survive jump to water from such altitude?

I reckon if your a hard cookie, you COULD theoreticaly survive impact into water if you jump standing/verticaly

I don't think so. I've jumped out of airplanes 200+ times, and have watched on separate occasions when two people went in, and been in a plane crash of a twin engine beech tail dragger.

1) Flight level 350 is 35,000 feet... The air temperature goes down 3 degrees for every 1000 feet you go up... If it was 70 deg F on the ground it is 35 below zero at altitude combine that with 400 mph wind speed... what would be the wind chill temperature? Good luck.

2) 1/2 of the worlds air lies below 10,000 feet You are not supposed to fly above (or is 12,500? that without pressurization or oxygen... When we would jump at 15,000 we all be feeling the altitiude (giddy) but none of us would admit it. (There was a time limit, no longer than 20 minutes or so above 10,000...but its been a few decades so sorry for not recalling the details) Oh and even on HOT summer days it is COLD.

3) In freefall head first one attains over 200 mph... Water would be a like a ROCK at 200 mph...

I Think they mean 18,870 flight hours which is about 2400 to 2500 flights over 4 years ( Feb 2005- Jun 2009)

just heard on the news which i missed mostly but the last bit said: there were about FIVE failures which were reported one after another

Originally posted by Freeman
just heard on the news which i missed mostly but the last bit said: there were about FIVE failures which were reported one after another

If the aircraft was undergoing a major failure, you would expect multiple reports - for example, an electrical bus failure will trigger its own report, and each of the systems that rely on the electrical bus failure will trigger their own reports, and then each of hte monitoring systems....

Its one of the ways to determine if the failure report is genuine or a spurious error itself.