A cigarette butt at a price in life (4 photos)

Traveling by plane is the dream of many, and everyone who traveled, knows how convenient and fast it is. However, many people afraid to travel by plane, despite the fact that it is considered one of the safest modes of transport in the world. But it is not prevents incidents during the trip.





For example, on the afternoon of July 11, 1973, the control tower of the Paris Orly airport received the following message: “Since we are going to die, at least we won't kill a lot of people there."

This phrase was heard from the cockpit of a Varig Boeing 707 aircraft, where Gilberto Araujo Silva, the flight commander, was struggling to breathe. When the plane was filled with smoke, the pilot tried to explain to the dispatcher his decision to land in the middle of the countryside, although he was less than a minute from the airport runway.

About 10 minutes before, at about two o'clock in the afternoon, the flight had already was on the last kilometers of the route Rio de Janeiro-Paris. Pilots already alerted 134 passengers and began the descent procedure. In this moment a coughing female passenger came out of one of the plane's toilets. "I'm a little didn’t die there,” she said.



Two flight attendants went to the toilet and through the open door saw very thick cloud of smoke. One of the flight attendants ran for a fire extinguisher, but when she returned, the fire was already spreading along the aisle of the aircraft.

The moment the smoke reached the cockpit, Commander Gilberto Araujo decided that the plane could not fly to Paris. If the plane crashed in within the city limits, it would cause a tragedy never seen before.

In this case, the only way out was an emergency landing on outskirts of the city. For this, only an uninhabited piece of land was suitable. nearby, an onion field in the village of Saul-le-Chartreux, south of the metropolis.

At this point, the pilots almost suffocated from the smoke, which did not let them see even the control panel. So they smashed the cabin windows stuck their faces out and landed like they were drivers entering the garage.

As a result of a forced landing, Araujo damaged his skull, spine and three vertebrae. The co-pilot was hit by tree branches and received an open fracture of the arm and a torn hand.

Although the landing was successful, the smoke choked most passengers. Oxygen in masks ran out in a few minutes, and carbon monoxide gas claimed the lives of 122 people. Almost all of the crew survived.



There were four oxygen tanks in the cockpit. And because they windows were broken, the pilot and co-pilot ended up ingesting less smoke. Only one flight attendant died after being thrown into a panel cabins.

Among the passengers, only Ricardo Trajano survived, who moment was 19 years old. During the descent, he crouched at the ajar door cabins. He managed to survive thanks to the air coming from the broken panels.

French firefighters found him unconscious, with broken bones and burns a few minutes after the plane crashed. Young man pulled out alive before the plane was consumed by fire.

Some time later, an investigation by the Department of Transportation France determined that the cause of the fire, most likely, was a cigarette butt not extinguished in the toilet. There was no smoking on board at the time of the accident forbidden.

After this tragedy, all airline agencies demanded that companies prohibit people from smoking in the toilets of aircraft.