The Hazard of Oz

A 337 breaks up and rains down from 27,000 feet. Amazingly, the right seat passenger lives to tell how it happened.

Monday, July 01, 2002 at 08:00 AM ET

Verified

Bottled oxygen is fed into a mask in order to create a little island of air that is abnormally rich in oxygen around the user’s nose and mouth. [Shutterstock, not the subject airplane]

Key Takeaways:

A fatal aviation accident occurred when a pilot's oxygen system was mistakenly filled with compressed air instead of aviator's oxygen, leading to hypoxia at 25,000 feet.
Hypoxia is an insidious condition that severely impairs judgment and affects individuals differently, as evidenced by the pilot's death while his assistant, though unconscious, survived the plane's breakup and crash.
Pilots can prevent hypoxia and manage oxygen use effectively by monitoring their blood oxygen saturation with an affordable pulse oximeter.

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If you’ve ever been troubled by doubts about the plausibility of Dorothy’s being carried off in her house by a tornado and then dumped back on the ground, house and all, without injury to herself or Toto, an accident that took place a few years ago should persuade you that it really could have happened.

A Cessna 337D Skymaster, an unpressurized, turbocharged twin modified with a floor-mounted camera in the cabin, departed its home base in order to do some aerial photography. The 3,100-hour private pilot and his assistant were aboard. After shooting three locations, they landed at another airport. There the pilot filed an IFR flight plan and “set up” the portable oxygen system, which had been charged that morning, for the next flight. This time, they would be climbing to 25,000 feet.