any travel horror stories?

I recently visted my grandparents who live in Scunthorpe the Manchester to Clevethorpes train, it goes via the pennines the views were shockingly good, on the M62 you just don't seem the views. All you get is loads of lorries spraying you.

I can imagine driving is good on nice quite country roads though.
 
Here you go:

titanic-sinking.jpg
 
The Devil said:
titanic-sinking.jpg
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Ahhh - THAT movie. The one that could have been so much better if it had been "A night to remember - the remake". The ship's fantastically recreated in Titanic, but the funnels aren't quite the correct size (compared to the real thing).

Also, there's this one bit that REALLY pees me off - blatant continuity flaw; the bit where Tommy and the rats are heading aft; they show an exterior shot and the whole ship is level, with only the first two rows of portholes visible. A totally impossible situation (the booklet for "Back to Titanic" also shows this blatant cockup). When you spend $300(?) million on a movie you could pay for decent continuity and technical staff surely?

You guys haven't seen a disaster movie until you've seen "The big bus" though :)

Isaac - yep, I know the DC10 was modified pretty sharpish, but if you'd seen the state of the one we were on, you'd have wandered... Quite unnerving...
 
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Isaac Sibson said:
By the time you flew on the DC10 the design of the cargo door mechanism had been changed to prevent a repeat of the crash. The DC10 has a lower fatal event rate than the 747.
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I saw a documentary once about the DC10 door-blowing-off fiasco..
They showed a memo from some MCdonnell-Douglas high-up saying it was cheaper to pay the compensation claims that to modify the doors on all existing DC10s!

Anyway, my worst holiday disaster was last year on a climbing trip to Tenerife.
My m8 had booked us a villa, and paid in full (!)...
We got to the village, and just as we were lokking for the villa we got a text from the "property agents" saying the villa was flooded, and we could saty in the agents flat.
So we went there - and it was a sh*thole.. Filthy, no bedding at all, cold and damp (it was the north of Tenerife in March), mould in the fridge etc.
So the following day we looked for the villa again and found someone staying there - we then found the owner who said the agents had never got in touch, never mind paid him, there was no flood and not only that the Kirstin Kellerman (cos that was her name - look out for it!) was out of the country due to the debts they had.
So after lots of searching we found another place, paid again then spent much of the rest of the holiday at the Office of Tourism trying to make a complaint.
Needless to say we never heard from the "agent" again, and our travel insurance people refused to pay saying we should take it up with our tour operator (?) as they don't cover fraud!
No problems with EasyJet or Ryanair though, despite 30+ flights with them.

Oh, and I got mugged at knife point in Morocco once.

And almost died in the Alps on a number of occasions...
 
leonard smalls said:
I saw a documentary once about the DC10 door-blowing-off fiasco..
They showed a memo from some MCdonnell-Douglas high-up saying it was cheaper to pay the compensation claims that to modify the doors on all existing DC10s!
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Actually, you're thinking of the Ford Pinto.

You don't get away with that in the aviation world, and all DC-10s were modified. McD did NOT have a choice about that.
 
Most scariest ( or more acurately most nervous) was a non-revenue test flight about 3-4 years ago. There was just me and the two pilots up front.
We ( the engineers) had just replaced the RH engine and also replaced the LH Propeller. We had to climb to 5000 ft. Turn off the 'old' engine to test and record the the climb power performance of the new engine, then re-start the 'old' Engine to shut down/Re-start the 'new' engine to ensure that it would re-light at altitude. 13 feet Dia. propellers have a profound drag effect when they aren't doing anything and the pilots had quite a bit to do to trim the A/C with all this drag and dead weight on one wing. Quite a roller coaster when the transition from Dead weight/drag to producing power happens.

I was a late flyer and didn't get my feet off the ground until i was 18 years old and had been in the RAF about a year or so. My first ever flight was in the back seat of an RAF Hawk jet trainer flying from RAF Chivenor in North Devon to RAF Leauchars on the east coast of Scotland ( basically where i live now ). Quite an introduction to life in 3 dimensions.
 
The Devil said:
I was referring to the original disaster, rather than the film.
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Yep, 'twas a disaster alright. What do you think happens when you ram a 46000 tonne ship at 22 knots into a known icefield? "This ship can't sink" "I can assure you she can"... Muppets.

And to think if they'd followed White Star procedures they'd have rammed the iceberg, mangled the bows, but stayed afloat...

What was the design flaw with the Ford Pinto then???
 
There was a problem with the fuel tank which meant that it had a habit of exploding when involved in minor rear-end shunts (There's a reference to this in the film "Top Secret" with Val Kilmer). Ford did the numbers, and found it would be cheaper to pay out on the claims than to change the design. This information got out into the public domain and was quite a scandal.

http://www.fordpinto.com/blowup.htm
 

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