Stratospheric Flight Quotes

“all the lights went out and the reassuring hum of the engines was replaced by the unfamiliar whirr of the air driven generator. This is a small, windmill-like device, which is normally stowed inside the fuselage and it is deployed into the airstream in such emergencies. Its role is to provide enough electrical power to run a few key instruments, such as the altimeter,”
― Andras Sóbester, Stratospheric Flight: Aeronautics at the Limit

“flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder (both painted a conspicuously bright orange, which makes them easier to find and presumably annoys those who insist on calling them `black boxes').”
― Andras Sóbester, Stratospheric Flight: Aeronautics at the Limit

“17-year old Cuban stowaway, Armando Socarras Ramirez, who in 1969 climbed into the wheel well of an Iberia DC-8 departing from Havana on an overnight flight to Madrid. An unsafe landing gear warning light illuminated in the cockpit shortly after departure, which, terrifyingly for Ramirez, led to the flight crew attempting to clear the fault by lowering the landing gear and raising it again.”
― Andras Sóbester, Stratospheric Flight: Aeronautics at the Limit

“Clearly, a point of interest along this scale is the altitude (and corresponding pressure) at which water will boil at body temperature, 37°C. As it turns out, this occurs at around 63 mbar-the atmospheric pressure drops to this value at an altitude of about 63000 feet”
― Andras Sóbester, Stratospheric Flight: Aeronautics at the Limit

“Earth's highest peaks: the fourteen `8000-ers'. Without proper acclimatization a climber would only be conscious for about two minutes on any of these summits.”
― Andras Sóbester, Stratospheric Flight: Aeronautics at the Limit