Danny Boy Profile picture
Dec 24, 2023 20 tweets 8 min read Read on X
I thought it might be nice timing to share my all-time favourite Christmas story.

This is a Christmas story very loosely in the same fashion 'Die Hard' is a 'Christmas film', as in it took place near Christmas time 😂

It's the story of the Gottröra Miracle.

Nobody died ⬇️ Image
Scandinavian Airlines System Flight 751 from Stockholm to Warsaw, departed at 8:47am on December 27th, 1991.

The plane was an almost brand new MD-81, basically in turn a 2nd generation DC-9 model.

McDonnell Douglas merged with Boeing in August, 1997 in a $13 billion deal. Image
St. Stephen's Day (December 26th, 1991) was bitterly cold in Sweden, as it often is at that time of year.

A mechanic reported to Captain Stefan Rasmussen there was much frost on wings.

De-icing fluid was applied but the captain still wasn't happy and asked for it done again.
Pilots were encouraged to voice concerns on de-icing jobs in the aftermath of the Air Florida Flight 90 disaster.

Boeing 737 that crashed into the 14th Street Bridge over the Potomac River, shortly after takeoff on January 13th, 1982.

74 of the 79 on board died, RIP 🙏 Image
The de-icing crews in Washington used mixtures of heated water & monopropylene glycol on that Boeing 737.

However they unevenly distributed the mixture between left and right side of plane.

Ice accumulated on wing, plane barely got off ground and hit the bridge.

Very sad.
When Captain Rasmussen inspected the wings in Stockholm in 1991, he wasn't thrilled with what he saw.

Asked for the underside of the wings done again.

De-icing crew did it again, assured him a good job done and visually it looked ok.

As you may guess, it was not in fact ok.
Immediately after take-off a bizarre humming noise heard in the cockpit, followed by a bang.

Bangs got louder and more frequent but captain wasn't sure what they were.

First Officer, Ulf Cedermark, was a former Swedish Fighter pilot and knew what it is.

A compressor stall. Image
A compressor stall is when air is not getting pushed backwards into burn chamber of the engine.

Causes a pressure imbalance and a terrifying sensation of sudden deceleration.

De-icing job was not "all good".

Snow froze into ice which broke off and slammed into right engine. Image
Only 78 seconds into flight they lost both engines.

In a huge stroke of luck, one of the passengers was a former fighter pilot.

Captain Per Holmberg heard the bangs, knew it's a compressor stall and waltzed into cockpit uninvited (the 90's!) asking:

Want a hand, guys? 🤷‍♂️
Another stroke of luck is the 2 pilots flying had no ego's.

Instead of being offended by his offer to help or even indignant at his temerity... 😡

They were like "sit right down my friend, we'll take all the help we can get!!" 😂

That was a brilliant decision, one of many 🙂
Hard to understate how lucky this proved.

Captain Per Holmberg had developed his own checklist for double engine failures and calmly went through that.

Per extended flaps, slowed the descent rate.

That enabled Captain Rasmussen to focus out the window on where to try go.
Meanwhile flight attendant Eva Björnemark knew they were in serious trouble but got no response from cockpit as the pilots were too busy.

Eva took it upon herself to prepare passengers for a crash landing.

If Eva hadn't been so alert and professional, people would have died.
This is Eva's account.

"It sounded as if you were tumbling stones in a washing machine. I had never heard that before in the 23 years I had been flying. I knew I had to act very quickly."

Heroic Eva (pictured below in 2021) broke two neck vertebrae in the crash. Image
As Eva prepared passengers for a crash, pilots were looking for somewhere to land.

Captain Rasmussen spotted a field but Ulf and Per calculated they wouldn't make the field and would instead hit the houses.

Quote:

"right, right, right, right, right, steer right, steer right!”
Pilots avoided the houses but hit the top of the trees in the forest and snapped the right wing off.

Eva shouted "brace, brace, brace" to passengers.

Captain Rasmussen controlled the plane for a tail first landing and the MD-81 broke into 3 pieces on impact. Image
Owing to the following facts:

-Pilots worked together
-Flight attendants were legends
-All passengers had their seatbelts on and listened to instructions...

Nobody died! 😍

In fact most passengers weren't even injured and walked out, which was a miracle within a miracle. Image
Newspapers throughout Europe called it a 'Christmas Miracle', below is the headline from the Evening Herald in late 1991.

Although it's superficially an apt headline, beneath the surface of the miracle you find its essence.

Teamwork.

People coming together in a crisis.
Image
Image
The moral of the story resonates with me.

Christmas can be a difficult time, whether due to ill health, loneliness or depression.

Nobody died in that crash because pilots weren't too proud to recognise they need help and to accept it.

Reach out to someone, if you need help ❤️
P.s. If anyone is interested in this from the pilots perspective and what exactly went wrong in tremendous detail:

As always @MenTourPilot made the best video.

It's absolutely fascinating and well worth a watch.

For anyone who prefers reading:

Best aviation blogger is Kyra Dempsey aka Admiral Cloudberg.

I frequently cite @KyraCloudy and direct to her blogs because they're truly exceptional.

"Drama in the Snow: The crash of Scandinavian Airlines flight 751"

admiralcloudberg.medium.com/drama-in-the-s…

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
 

Keep Current with Danny Boy

Danny Boy Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @Care2much18

Apr 16
I read that Supreme Court judgement in the UK today.

It's very long at 88 pages and was not a quick or easy read, though judging by discussion online not many on Twitter attempted to read it. 😂

I'll summarise it, if anybody is interested in reading a shorter version. /1
Just for emphasis ⬇️

This thread is a summary of a Supreme Court judgement, there are no personal opinions in this thread.

So if you're reading this thread and don't like the words you're reading, it's the judges words not mine.
Lord Hodge, Lady Rose, Lady Simler, Lord Reed and Lord Lloyd-Jones all in agreement.

The first point they made is they're not defining what the word 'woman' means.

In terms of law, the only question in front of them is what does the word 'woman' mean in the Equality Act 2010. Image
Read 18 tweets
Mar 20
Garron Noone being championed by every far-right clown in Ireland.

I'll go through what he said in order to go way, way up in the estimation of bigots.

Also some factual counterpoints to his views, which in my opinion could charitably be described as "ignorant shite." /1 Image
Definition of far-right used in many studies is meeting at least 3 of the following 5 characteristics.

(1) nationalism, (2) racism, (3) xenophobia, (4) antidemocracy or (5) strong state advocacy.

If not meeting at least 3, then you're not being referred to by the term.
Quote:

"My opinion on Conor McGregor is irrelevant but I don't think he's a good person, I don't think it's particularly hard to find evidence of that, but it doesn't surprise me..."

Most of that sentence, though not all, is an opinion many people share.

Fair enough.
Read 24 tweets
Mar 5
This genius continues to imply there are 200-year-old vampires collecting social security and obtaining loans.

Quite possible we're living through the dumbest possible version of the year 2025. 😂

I'll go through a few facts, for anybody who doesn't believe in vampires. /1 Image
In the early 1970's the US Social Security Administration began the thankless task of creating a central database.

It involved inputting tens of millions of Social Security Numbers from paper or microfilm.

They called it "The Numident" and nowadays it's just 'Numident'.
Numident is basically what it sounds like it should be from its name.

It's a numerically-ordered master file of assigned Social Security Numbers (SSNs) i.e. identity.

After the Y2K scare the date of death format on Numident became MMDDCCYY or Month / Day / Century / Year. Image
Read 11 tweets
Feb 14
This speech is full of half-truths, distortions, misleading claims and outright lies.

Basically living up to every meme, trope and unfair stereotype, of Americans being ignorant morons.

I'll go through each of the claims he made in this segment and what the actual facts are. /1
Quote: "I look to Brussels, where EU Commisars warn citizens that they intend to shut down social media during times of civil unrest, the moment they spot what they've judged to be hateful content."

That's a whopper of a distortion of EU law, that no serious person should make.
Link to the EU law is below, I'll discuss it in the next tweet.

Regulation (EU) 2022/2065 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 19 October 2022 on a Single Market For Digital Services and amending Directive 2000/31/EC (Digital Services Act)

eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2022/2…
Read 15 tweets
Feb 1
This wildly misleading tweet, and the mostly hateful replies, is like entering an alternate version of reality.

If anybody is interested in the truth behind this claim, and what that Swedish poll actually asked, I'll go through it.

Probably banging my head against a wall. 😂 Image
The poll was conducted by a reputable Swedish polling company, Novus, between August 18th - 24th, 2022.

It was commissioned by a libertarian magazine, Bulletin, who eventually published it with a very misleading headline.

Sample size was 1,050 foreign-born persons.
The question asked was "have you visited your home country?"

85% of respondents said 'yes'.

No surprise as 1,050 foreign-born persons comprised many who moved to Sweden, for employment, from neighbouring Norway, Finland, Denmark, Germany.

Not hard or expensive to visit home.
Read 8 tweets
Jan 30
Blaming the air traffic controller - and somehow linking it to 'diversity' - is incomprehensible nonsense from a man devoid of empathy.

ATC audio can be listened to by anybody, including the American president who can't be bothered to do that.

I'll go through the transcript. /1
The two callsigns for the aircraft, just to help reading this thread they call these back.

1. PAT25 - United States Army Sikorsky VH-60M Black Hawk registration 00-26860

2. BLUESTREAK 5342 - Bombardier CRJ700 series flying as American Eagle Flight 5342, registration N709PS.
ATC: Bluestreak 5342, Washington Tower, winds are 320 at 17, gusts 25. Can you take Runway 33?

Bluestreak 5342: Yeah we can do Runway 33, Bluestreak 5342.

ATC: Bluestreak 5342, make the turn to 33. Cleared to land.

Bluestreak 5342: Runway 33, cleared to land, Bluestreak 5342.
Read 7 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal

Or Donate anonymously using crypto!

Ethereum

0xfe58350B80634f60Fa6Dc149a72b4DFbc17D341E copy

Bitcoin

3ATGMxNzCUFzxpMCHL5sWSt4DVtS8UqXpi copy

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us!

:(