Staying Alive—Parts 9 and 10: Out and More Out
Try to exit the plane in an orderly fashion. Professor Helen Muir of Cranfield University in the UK is a world leader in the field of analysing the factors that influence survival in accidents. She and her team have carried out hundreds of simulated plane evacuations. In one study, the ‘passengers’ formed orderly lines and exited the plane quickly. She then offered £5 to the first half of the ‘passengers’ out of the plane. There was a mad rush and lots of congestion at the exits, taking everyone longer to get out of the plane.
Once you are outside, move right away from the plane. Move a few hundred metres away, and upwind if you can, in case the wreckage erupts into a fireball.
Rain Man Was Wrong
In the 1988 movie Rain Man, the intelligent and autistic Raymond (Dustin Hoffman) says that Qantas has never had any fatalities, and so he refuses to fly on any airline but Qantas. But he was wrong.
True, Qantas has never had any fatalities with its fleet of passenger jets. But at the time the movie was released, the airline had had eight separate crashes—two in 1951, the other six going back to 1934—in propeller planes. A total of 55 people died.
Happy Stories
Above all, obey the instructions of the highly trained cabin crew—their main job is not to feed you sweets and drinks, but to keep you alive if something goes very wrong.
In 2005, an Airbus overran the runway while landing in Toronto. Four of the eight exits were unusable. Nevertheless, the flight attendants managed to empty the plane of its 309 passengers and crew in less than two minutes. The plane then erupted into flames, but nobody died.
Think of the Boeing 777 that crash-landed at Heathrow Airport in mid-January 2008. The impact was so savage that it ripped off the right landing gear and rammed the left landing gear up into the very solid root of the left wing (where the wing joins the plane). All 152 passengers and crew survived.
So chocks away—and have a nice flight.
United Airlines Flight 232
Modern aeroplanes usually have several systems to do the same job, so that if one fails, another can take over. For example, the DC-10 has three engines—one on each wing and one on the tail. It also has three hydraulic systems to operate the control surfaces. But all three sets of hydraulic pipes go through the same 20 cm hole near the tail of the plane.
On United Airlines Flight 232 on 19 July 1989, the engine mounted in the tail exploded, throwing debris into the tail of the DC-10—some of the high-speed shrapnel cutting through all of the three hydraulic pipes.
By an amazing coincidence, Dennis E. Fitch, a DC-10 flight instructor, was travelling as a passenger on this flight. Before the plane had actually begun flying commercially, Dennis had some sessions in the DC-10 flight simulator learning how to fly the new plane. After one session, just for fun, he asked if he could try to fly the `plane’ using only the engines—not the control surfaces. After a long and exhausting session, he worked out that he could turn the plane by running one wing engine at a different speed from the other wing engine. He also worked out that he could lose altitude by slowing all the engines and gain altitude by accelerating them.
He was probably the only person in the whole world who had ever practised flying the DC-10 without control surfaces. Once Flight 232 malfunctioned and began flying erratically, he volunteered his services to the flight crew, who immediately and gratefully accepted. He used his skills to regain a little control over the crippled beast.
After some very scary incidents in the air, he touched down on the shorter runway (barely managing to do so) at Sioux Gateway Airport (the nearest available). The plane was sinking six times faster than normal—563 m (1,850 ft) per minute as compared to the normal 91 m (300 ft) per minute. It was also coming in at almost twice the normal speed—240 knots (444 kph) instead of 140 knots (260 kph).
Not only was it a hard landing, the DC-10 didn’t land squarely. In fact, it bounced a few times. The tip of the right wing hit first and broke open, spilling fuel which immediately caught fire. The tail section hit the runway very hard and simply broke off. The landing gear and the wing engines were torn off. The passenger-filled fuselage broke into several sections. On the final bounce, the flaming right wing was torn off and the largest section of the fuselage slid sideways along the runway and slowly rolled upside down.
Of the people on board, 185 (including Dennis E. Fitch) survived. However, 111 died, most of them from the repeated impacts of the plane hitting the runway, and some from inhaling toxic smoke.
People survived that day as a result of a number of fortunate coincidences. Dennis E. Fitch—who had trained to fly a DC-10 without control surfaces—was on the plane. The Iowa National Guard were on duty at the airport that day—this meant that 285 people skilled in dealing with emergencies were right on hand. And the accident happened during a change of shift at both the local Trauma Center and the regional Burns Center—effectively, twice as many medical staff were on hand to treat the victims.
It was one of the luckiest plane crashes ever.
References
‘Annual statistics show continued improvement in aviation safety’, National Transportation Safety News, 13 March 2007.
Bibel, George, ‘Listen up and fly right’, The New York Times, 26 January 2008.
Findlay, S.J. and Harrison, N.D., ‘Why materials fail’, Materials Today, November 2002, Vol 5, Issue 11, pp 18–25.
Grossman, David, ‘Check your travel superstitions, or carry them on’, USA Today, 31 October 2005.
Noland, David, ‘Safest seat on a plane: PM investigates how to survive a crash’, Popular Mechanics, 18 July 2007.
Noland, David, ‘10 plane crashes that changed aviation’, Popular Mechanics, September 2007.
Wilber, Del Quentin, ‘Avoiding plane crashes by crunching numbers: Data mining helps identify subtle flaws’, Washington Post, 13 January 2008.
Mayan Apocalypse, 2012
The taxi driver was taking me from Melbourne airport into the city. As we chatted, it emerged that he was deeply worried. He had a wife and child, and a new baby on the way—but what was the use of living, he cried. After all, he had read on the internet that Mayan prophecies claimed the world would end in 2012, when his newborn baby would be just five years of age.
Eve of Destruction
Prophecies about the end of the world (or, at the very least, civilisation as we know it) have probably been around forever.
There was a flurry of Destruction Prophecies around the time of the new millennium in the year 2000. For some unknown reason, people seem to think that God wants the Universe to self-destruct whenever there is a bunch of zeros in the calendar date. There was another bunch of Doom and Destruction prophecies for 5 May 2005, when all the planets were supposed to line up—by the way, they didn’t line up and, yep, we’re still here. And more recently, some people were convinced that the world would come to an end in early 2008 when the planet’s population reached 6.66 billion.
In addition to internet sites forecasting the End of Days, there are quite a few books devoted to the topic. These include Mayan Prophecies by Adrian Gilbert and Maurice Cotterell (1995) and 2012: Mayan Year of Destiny by Adrian Gilbert (2006). Two books by José Argüelles, The Mayan Factor in 1987 and The Thirteen Moon Calendar in 1992, are very imaginative. In 1998, José Argüelles declared that ‘Argüelles is dead’, and that he was now reborn as ‘Valum Votan’, some kind of successor to a Mayan ruler. He found a solution to the universal apocalypse that was coming—simply get rid of our Gregorian calendar, adopt some kind of lunar calendar, and all would be well.
Mayan Writings
The invading Spaniards did not have much respect for the Mayans. In 1565, Diego de Landa, a missionary Brother who later became the Bishop of Merida, wrote: ‘We found a large number of books in these characters and, as they contained nothing in which were not to be seen as superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all, which they “the Maya” regretted
to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affliction.’
Mayan Society
The Mayan civilisation covered the skinny bit of the Americas between North and South America, ranging from the southern states of Mexico down to western Honduras. Its Classic Period occurred from 250 to 900 AD, so their best years were behind them by the time of the Spanish Conquistador invasion in the 1500s.
At their peak, the Mayans had the only mature written language ever found in the Americas, spectacular and densely populated cities, and very sophisticated systems of mathematics, astronomy and calendars.
They were marvellous astronomers, observing the skies only with the naked eye. (And disregard what you read in the New Age media—the Mayans did not ‘learn astronomy via Atlantis from extraterrestrials’.) Their measurements of the year, the lunar month and the movements of Venus were more accurate than those of the ancient Greeks. On the other hand, they were not quite as accurate as the Greeks in measuring the movements of Mars. And they did not devise either the wheel or the stone arch.
Nonetheless, their calendars were very ingenious.
Mayan Apocalypse
There has always been someone, somewhere, predicting that the end of the world is near. Prophecies about the end of the world have been around for thousands of years.
The Mayan civilisation covered the skinny bit of the Americas between North and South America, ranging from the southern states of Mexico down to western Honduras.
Calendars 101
According to the dictionary, a calendar is ‘a system for organising days into a purpose that is religious, socially, commercially or administratively useful’.
Calendars usually consist of several levels. The first level is usually fairly short—for example, a ‘week’ made up of seven days. The next level, in our Western Gregorian calendar, is the ‘month’ made up of several weeks.
It all starts to get really messy when the makers of the calendar try to synchronise it with some regularly occurring natural phenomenon. The Islamic calendar is a lunar calendar, i.e. each month begins with a new moon. The ancient Persians had a solar calendar based on the time it takes for the Earth to make one revolution around the Sun. Our Western Gregorian calendar is basically a solar calendar, with a few fudges (leap years) thrown in to try to keep it in line with reality. Some ancient Egyptian calendars followed the movements of Venus. The ‘solar–lunar’ calendar (e.g. the Jewish calendar and the Celtic Coligny calendar) that tries to follow the movements of both the Sun and the Moon had to insert an extra month every 19 years to keep it accurate.
Mayan Calendars 101
The Mayans had many calendars, because they saw ‘time’ as a meshing of sacred or spiritual cycles. They used their various calendars to mark the time between rituals, to try to interpret omens and to predict future astronomical events.
Blame Augustus Caesar for Crazy February
The old Roman calendar was a kind of lunar calendar. The Moon takes about 29.5 days to complete its orbit around the Earth. Therefore, the old Roman calendar had months that were alternately 29 and 30 days long, making it a ‘year’ of only 354 days. So Julius Caesar’s astronomers changed this to months composed alternately of 30 and 31 days. To try to keep in time with the seasons, February had 30 days only in leap years.
Julius Caesar modestly named the month of July after himself. Not to be outdone, Augustus Caesar named August after himself. And to make August as long as July, he stole a day from February and shoved it into August.
The Haab Calendar
At their peak, the Mayans had the only mature written language ever found in the Americas…and their calendars were also very nice.
The glyphs of the Mayan months, which start at Pop, plus the five ‘unlucky’ days at the end of the year called Wayeb.
Mayan Calendars—Part 1: Tzolkin
The most important of the Mayan calendars was the Tzolkin calendar, which is still used in the Guatemalan highlands. It ran for 260 days, with 20 time periods (winal) of 13 days.
There are several theories about how this calendar came into existence. The first theory suggests that the Mayans used the numbers 13 and 20 for the days and ‘months’ because these numbers were important in Mayan society. The second theory claims that the 260-day calendar is significant because it is the length of time that it takes to grow a baby. The third theory claims that 260 days is the period of time between planting the crops and reaping the harvest (but surely this would depend on which crop you planted, and the weather). Another suggestion is that the 260 days of the Tzolkin calendar relate to the length of time that Venus is visible as a morning star.
This calendar began with the Olmec (an ancient pre-Columbian society) before 1200 BC. (We don’t know why, but the Olmec society declined rapidly between 400 and 350 BC.) (By the way, the Olmec almost certainly invented the use of rubber balls in sport.)
Each day was unique, with its own patron spirit. So one day might be good for travel but bad for selling.
Mayan Calendars—Part 2: Haab
Another Mayan calendar was the Haab. Because it got fairly close to the actual time that it takes for the Earth to go around the Sun, it’s sometimes called a ‘vague’ solar year. It consisted of 360 days—18 months, each of 20 days—plus a group of five ‘nameless days’, called the Wayeb, added at the end of the year. These ‘nameless days’ were fairly dangerous, and people had to be especially careful about carrying out the proper New Year rituals. For example, during this period, the Mayans were advised against leaving their houses or taking care of their hair.
However, Mayan astronomers completely ignored the extra quarter of a day that it takes the Earth to get back to its starting point. For this reason, the Haab would gradually drift across the seasons.
The Haab calendar matched up exactly with their Tzolkin calendar every 52 Haab cycles or 73 Tzolkin cycles. If you multiply a Haab cycle of 365 days by 52, you get 18,980 days. And if you multiple a Tzolkin cycle of 260 days by 73, you get exactly the same number of 18,980 days. The Calendar Round combined the Tzolkin and the Haab to make a longer cycle (of 52 Haab years or 73 Tzolkin years).
They ‘named’ the days by having the day number followed by the month—a system used by the ancient Egyptians.
Mayan Calendars—Part 3: Long Count
Which brings us to the calendar that supposedly ‘predicts’ the end of the world in 2012. According to what you can find on the internet, at ‘sunrise on 21 December 2012, the Sun rises to conjunct the intersection of the Milky Way and the plane of the ecliptic’.
One of the several Mayan calendars was called the Long Count. It was set up around 355 BC, and had, as its chosen starting date, the Beginning of the World, 0.0.0.0.0, which corresponds to 11 August 3114 BC—a few thousand years earlier. (However, there are also arguments for 12 and 13 August as the starting date.)
And on 21 December 2012, the Mayan Long Count calendar will read 13.0.0.0.0.
Now here’s how it works. Our numbering system is based on 10. But the Mayans had a counting system based on 20. Therefore, most of the ‘slots’ in their calendar had 20 potential numbers—0 to 19. The calendar read a little like the odometer in your car’s speedometer (which runs from 0 to 9). The extreme right slot (of five slots) would count through the days and when it got to 19 days (0.0.0.0.19) it would reset to zero, the next slot across to the left then increasing by one (to 0.0.0.1.0).
So 0.0.0.0.1 was one day, 0.0.0.1.0 was 20 days, 0.0.1.0.0 was about one year, and 0.1.0.0.0 was about 20 years. Once the calendar reached 1.0.0.0.0, it had clocked up about 400 years. And on 21 December 2012, the Mayan Long Count calendar will read 13.0.0.0.0 (this is the famous ‘killer’ Mayan date that some people worry about).
Various rock carvings (called ‘stela’) have been found with Long Count dates on them. Stela C (that’s how the archaeologists name them), at the Olmec archaeological site of Tres Zapotes, has one of the oldest Long Count dates found so far—7.16.6.16.18, corresponding to 3 Sept
ember 32 BC. Stela 2 at Chiapa de Corzo has the date of 7.16.3.2.13, i.e. 10 December 36 BC.
Maths of the Long Count
The Mayan Long Count calendar began with 0.0.0.0.0. It had five slots which filled up from the right, and working across to the left. The slot at the extreme right counted the days (or kin). It started at zero, going up to 19 days. It had 20 possible values (ranging from 0 to 19), because the Mayans had a counting system based on 20, not 10 as we do. So one day was 0.0.0.0.1, while 19 days was 0.0.0.0.19. On the 20th day, with the kin slot already filled up, the kin slot reset itself to zero, and the count started on the next slot. So 20 days—the length of their ‘month’ registered on the Long Count as 0.0.0.1.0.
The next slot counted the months (winal or uinal)—and there were 18 months in their ‘year’. There was a reason for the shift from the 20-system to an 18-system—20 days x 18 months equals 360 days, which is fairly close to a solar year (which is 365-and-a-bit days). The Mayans didn’t need the Long Count calendar to be accurate for years, because their other calendars took care of this. When both the right-hand slots were filled to the maximum, the Long Count read 0.0.0.17.19. This was equal to 17 months, consisting of 19 days (340 days) plus one lot of 19 days, giving a total of 359 days—which was one day less than their year of 360 days.
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