THE ILYUSHIN II-76 AND IT’S CARGO DOORS

While the Flightline crew were loading the 80 skids of medical supplies aboard our ride, one of the major topics of conversation amongst the passengers, John Connell and Randy Weiss of AmeriCares and myself, was the news story, only a few days old about the Ilyushian 76 whose rear cargo doors had opened, sucking out 120 passengers. Here’s the story as reported by Reuters:

OVER 120 KILLED IN FREAK CARGO PLANE ACCIDENT.

Passengers were sucked out of a Russian-made plane over the Democratic Republic of Congo late on Thursday after a door opened accidentally during the flight, a military official said on Friday.

'The doors opened including the ramp as the pressure system broke down. Everybody was sucked out and is presumed dead,' the official in the capital Kinshasa said.

It was not immediately clear how many passengers were on board. A Russian aviation official in Kinshasa, who declined to be named, said he believed there were 129 people on board.

He said the pilot had managed to turn the plane around and land in Kinshasa after the accident.

Congo's Minister for Peace Vital Kamerhe confirmed that a cargo door had opened mid-flight and that there was some damage.

The Russian official said the plane was an Ilyushin 76 and had been chartered by the Congolese army to fly from Kinshasa to Lubumbashi, Congo's second biggest city in the southeast and home to a big military base.

He said he believed the passengers were a mixture of military officials and civilians.

The four-engined Ilyushin 76 is a versatile transport aircraft widely used in Africa, the Middle East, India and China, and remains in service despite its age because of the shortage of cargo aircraft worldwide.

So even before we would land in Baghdad and worry about a sniper picking off a prized target of an American humanitarian aid worker, we could, if we really wanted to, worry about being sucked out of the back door of our plane, somewhere over the Mediterranean maybe. We could’ve, but the three of us left the worrying to our wives. Our pilot Anatoly said he had heard other instances of the doors opening—sometime in the 1980’s—but didn’t seem at all worried. Of course he was strapped into his seat which was up a ladder and through a door. He’d have a long way to go before he was sucked out of a back door!

The other thing was, 80 heavy skids sat between us and the opening.

None of we three passengers had any problem sleeping. In fact, I’ve never slept so soundly on a plane.

Posted by Tony at May 25, 2003 08:00 AM