Qantas Checks All Oxygen Cylinders On All Its Boeing 747
Qantas Checks All Oxygen Cylinders On All Its Boeing 747

According to CNN, The Civil Aviation Safety Authority required the Australia’s national airline to analyze every single oxygen bottle in its fleet of Boeing 747s. The necessity came after investigators asserted that an exploding cylinder might have made a hole in one of the planes while it was flying on Friday.

Due to the mid-air blast, the Qantas flight had to make an emergency landing in the Philippines. No passenger was injured.

Australian authorities asked the country’s airline to check oxygen bottles and the brackets that hold them in each of the 30 Boeing 747 that is part of Qantas' fleet. "It will be a visual inspection and it is a precautionary step," said CASA spokesman Peter Gibson.

As maintained by the Australian Associated Press, the state news agency believes that the rupture in the jumbo jet was caused by an exploding oxygen cylinder, because there was no evidence of fire and the container had been found where the explosion occured.

When the blast took place, the airplane was heading from London to Melbourne, cruising at 8,800 meters with 346 passengers on board. The jet lost both cabin pressure and altitude so the crew members brought the plane down from 29,000 feet (8,840 meters) to 10,000 feet (3,048 meters). Afterwards, they diverted the aircraft to Manila International Airport, Philippine, where it landed with no problems.

An A U.S. Transportation Security Administration official told CNN that a preliminary investigation didn’t discover any link to terrorism. The National Transportation Safety Board also is sending investigators to determine what really happened.

 




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