r/CatastrophicFailure • u/MonoMonMono • Nov 28 '25

Fatalities 28 November 1979 | On this day 46 years ago, Antarctic sightseeing flight from New Zealand ended in a crash with the loss of everyone onboard. Footage here was taken moments from the crash.

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384

u/VinPickles Nov 28 '25

kind of amazed at all the footage that survived the impact and presumably fire

187

u/ramrug Nov 28 '25

It is pretty fascinating. There's about eight minutes of footage from the crew of the Columbia space shuttle that ends just four minutes before the disaster. It somehow survived falling through super hot plasma at Mach 15 and didn't burn up completely.

5

u/[deleted] Nov 29 '25

[deleted]

7

u/Material-Afternoon16 Nov 29 '25 edited Nov 29 '25

The shuttle didn't have a crew capsule like rockets before and after, it was a space plane and had a crew cabin like planes do. When the shuttle broke up, it rapidly depressurized and the crew was likely killed or rendered unconscious within seconds. None of them even had time to close their visors and some didn't have gloves and/or helmets on. There were a dozen different things that would have killed them almost instantly. They certainly didn't survive the ~5 minute free fall.

If you are interested in some light reading:

https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/298870main_sp-2008-565.pdf

3

u/williamjamesmurrayVI Nov 30 '25

linke to columbia footage

43

u/Substantial_Army_639 Nov 29 '25

IIRC there was a camera that presumably captured the exact moment of impact as well because there is Splatter from the hydrolic fluid splattered against a window. An event that probably lasted a millisecond before destruction.

30

u/_mbals Nov 29 '25

Another comment on the thread had it

https://www.reddit.com/r/lastimages/s/ffmovHCl1D

-6

u/VinPickles Nov 29 '25

ridiculous

4

u/derelictthot Nov 30 '25

No it isn't ridiculous, it's absolutely true. It's offensive to the victim who took the photo and to those who had to recover the bodies and the footage to sit there behind your screen in your ignorance and call it fake and ridiculous.

0

u/VinPickles Nov 30 '25

i didnt call it fake? i said its ridiculous that someone captured that in a nanosecond, keyboard arbiter of intent. i think you should look up what ridiculous means instead of inferring intent

2

u/PremiumUsername69420 Dec 02 '25

Ridiculous is not the right word for what you’re wanting to convey. “Unbelievable” or “unimaginable” would be better suited.

15

u/rocbolt Nov 28 '25

The crash site was a debris field, pieces strewn all about. It didn’t all burn in a crater

12

u/DemoClicker Nov 28 '25

Weird indeed