Valorous Visitation of a by-gone Vexation

Commercial airliners are a wonder of the 20th century. These machines, which are a gazillion times heavier than air, can easily carry a few hundred passengers, together with their luggage and the fuel and supplies required to operate the craft, into the air and fly at speeds of many times the speed of sound!

Never did our ancestors dare to dream that we would someday be able to soar freely in the sky. And they surely didn't expect us to be able to fit bedrooms, bathrooms and kitchens into our flying machines.








How is it possible for something so heavy to simply lift off and float in the sky? Well, part of the reason is because of the huge engines on commercial airliners which generates immense amounts of thrust to keep the plane in flight.

Jet engine is the most common type of engine used to propel modern airliners.




A jet engine works by sucking in air and then expelling them out at high speeds and temperature to generate the thrust required to push the airliner forward.




An airliner can easily weigh up to several hundred tonnes. Thats in thousands of kilograms mind you. To understand the amount of thrust required to propel an airliner forward, picture this:

an average human being weighs about 60 kg and all it takes is for a car traveling at maybe 80km/h to hit the person and he will go flying for several metres before crash landing. Airliners usually travel at about 900km/h. And they weigh several hundred thousand kilograms.




So, you now have a rough idea of how strong the suction of a jet engine is. Therefore, if the jet engine happens to be sucking anything else other than air...



In this context, the jet engine is not unlike a meat grinder.




Actually, the input doesn't necessary have to be a cattle. You can put in other types of meat and you will still get more or less the same output.




In other words, the meat in your MegaMac could be human and you won't know it. I discovered this shocking fact while reading Fast Food Nation but I will probably elaborate more on that in a separate post.

Now back to the main objective of this post: on January 16, 2006, an aviation mechanic was carrying out his routine maintenance duties on a Boeing 737 at El Paso International Airport in Texas, USA when he stepped too close to one of the plane's jet engines and... got transformed.
































































I really hope his death was swift and instant. Its really a brutal way to die. Talk about now you see him, now you don't.

Hmmm... maybe I should re-consider my career options.