Alli’s Blog
asks the question “Where does jet fuel go when it’s dumped?”
The answer is, downwards as gravity takes it. There’s fairly well documented cases of this landing in non-ideal places. Best efforts are (supposed) to be made to not to do this in non-ideal places (i.e. over where people are) but it does happen.
The idea is that fuel needs to be dumped in an emergency before a safe landing can be made. (see something like the Aircraft Incidents section on San Francisco airport wikipedia page)
The F-111 is nice as it dumps fuel at the rear of the aircraft between two jets. This has the rather spectacular effect of a “dump and burn”. Arguably a much better thing than spraying fuel onto (land|people|ocean).
I should also point out that yes, it’s a known carcinogen
Actually – there’s a pretty good chance it wasn’t even fuel, especially if they were coming in to land. More than likely it was wingtip vortices, such as in this picture here
http://www.airliners.net/open.file/235860/L/
To learn about how they form check out this page
http://www.airliners.net/open.file/235860/L/
Actually I meant this page
http://virtualskies.arc.nasa.gov/research/tutorial/avoss.html
oops…
That’s very interesting. I wonder if there is any empirical evidince that links jet fuel to cancer in humans. In otherwords, are there any studies that show that people developed cancer becuase of jet fluid.