Talk:LOT Polish Airlines Flight 5055

Wrong robot category edit
I think that the following category edit is wrong: Cydebot (talk | contribs)‎ m (20,817 bytes) (Robot - Speedily moving category In-flight aircraft fires to Category:Airliner accidents and incidents caused by in-flight fires per CFDS.) (undo) There was a fire, but it was not the cause of the accident. The accident was caused by engine failure that in turn damaged the flight control systems. Thomas.Hedden (talk) 13:49, 29 November 2011 (UTC)

English translation of "Czesc, giniemy!"
I have corrected the English translation of "Czesc, giniemy!" twice now, but an anonymous user keeps changing it back. The progressive present tense in English suggests an act in progress, rather than an act that is about to happen. The pilot made this statement BEFORE the plane crashed, not afterwards. Accordingly, the English translation should use the future rather than the progressive present tense. I am a native speaker of English and studied Polish at the UC Berkeley, and lived in Poland for six months. I am also a professional translator. I would be curious to know the native language and professional qualifications of the person who is making these changes who won't even sign his/her name to his/her work.Thomas.Hedden (talk) 12:24, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

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While I don't disagree with your edit, the issue itself is a bit more complicated (I'm saying this as a native speaker of Polish). The verb "ginąć" as such is not really applicable to an action performed over time. It is either a momentary occurence, in which case usually the telic equivalent "zginąć" is used, or it applies only to frequentative sense as in "żołnierze często giną na wojnie" = "soldiers often die in a war", where it references either a repeated action or a general statement. And so the utterance of the crew carries a very specific, future oriented, fatalistic and also colloquial undertone which is very hard to translate, and in my view (could be wrong) is completely lost in the "we're dying" translation. One must also take into account that the translation as English "we're dying" has a broader meaning and carries a risk of interpretation as Polish "umieramy", which would convey the wrong idea.

Privately I would be tempted to alter the English translation to "we're dead now", because these are likely the words I think an English speaker would use to convey the same idea. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.232.234.3 (talk) 21:03, 10 September 2009 (UTC)

EDIT: For the record I was not the original editor. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.232.234.3 (talk) 21:10, 10 September 2009 (UTC)

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"We die" would probably be the most accurate English translation for "giniemy". Its a bit more formal than "umieramy" which means "we're dying." Its more something you'd expect to hear along the lines of "we die for our country", etc. IMO he wasn't just telling the traffic controllers an update of his situation, he was making a statement, a final statement, which is why he used this word specifically. "We're lost" would be an example of an English phrase which would carry the same emotional context.

You're not incorrect in using the term "we're dying" in allowing an English reader to understand what the pilot said, but if you want to correctly convey what the pilot meant in his final words, a different term would be better. 71.83.161.16 (talk) 18:13, 8 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Well, how is it translated in the final accident report? WhisperToMe (talk) 18:56, 5 February 2012 (UTC)

Fate of stewardess
According to the cabin voice recorder, the stewardess who was never found was sucked out of the airplane. Thomas.Hedden (talk) 03:39, 25 November 2008 (UTC)
 * She isn;t sucked out - probably she died in fire in aft on plane long before plane crashed. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.8.27.59 (talk) 20:31, 12 March 2009 (UTC)
 * According to the Discovery Channel documentary, when the engine failed the turbine disc shrapnel punched a hole through baggage compartment no. 4 which was also above technical bay number 6 of the plane and caused the decompression. The door to the technical bay was pushed by a force of several tons with the high cabin pressure, making it impossible to open. Since her body is nowhere near the site of where part of the failed tubine would be found, that hole can't have been big enough to suck her out. It's possible that her remains are among the 62 fatalities who were never identified.

Documentaries of this accident
Please include this section in the page. This accident has been aired on Polish television by the Discovery Channel as "Historie Lotnicze: LOT 5055 Katastrofa W Lesie Kabackim"- (Aviation History: Flight 5055- Disaster in Kabaty Woods) as well as an episode of the Polish documentary Czarny Serial (Black Serial in Polish.). There is a video which is about the Discovery Channel documentary on youtube as well as a channel which has the full video trimmed into 8 parts, but includes loosely translated English captions. Both documentaries include interviews with employees of LOT, the experts who helped in investigating the crash as well as eyewitnesses to the accident. The Discovery Channel documentary also includes interviews with Captain Pawlaczyk's son; Jacek Pawlaczyk. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Brian2759 (talk • contribs) 06:55, 25 April 2015 (UTC)

More citations
This article is in serious need of additional citations. It hasn't any additional citations for 7 years. MattChatt18 (talk) 19:35, 23 September 2016 (UTC)

Speed of fragments
I seriously doubt "debris from the explosion spread around with an estimated speed of 160 kilometers PER SECOND"! The value fails several plausibility tests:
 * turbine speeds are in the tens of thousands of rpm, turbine diameters on the order of 1 meter. This gives, at best, tangential speeds of 1000 meters per second, 160 times less than the value quoted.
 * kinetic energy of ONE 100 gram fragment at 160 km/s is ~ 1GJ. That's about a quarter of a ton of TNT. The turbine disk that disintegrated weighs tens of kilograms so the total kinetic energy would be equivalent to several tens of tons of TNT. At 160 km/s, that shrapnel would vaporize at least the whole tail of the aircraft, if not the whole plane.
 * those fragments, traveling at interstellar speeds (sol system escape speed is 16 km/s, Omuamua interstellar asteroid entered sol system with about 25 km/s) would create quite a fireworks show in the atmosphere. At about 100 km/s, air piling up in front of an object traveling at that speed starts to undergo nuclear fusion. So we're talking about nuclear bomb-like heat, light and shock waves.

I think a more plausible value for the speed of the fragments would be 160 kilometer PER HOUR, after punching through the turbine casing, fuselage, other engines, etc. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.186.148.141 (talk) 09:20, 10 March 2018 (UTC)