Even as your Boeing flight is falling out of the sky, they find a way to fail you one last time.
Poor guy posted this then shot himself, so sad.
Huh, interesting. I guess this makes sense - to not take up a massive volume, breathing oxygen would need to be stored in liquid form, which means it would need to be kept exceptionally cold or under huge pressures (or both), and would inevitably boil off and need regular servicing. A chemical reaction seems to be a far lower maintenance (and thus likely much cheaper) option for devices that will hopefully never even need to be used during the service life of an aircraft.
Cheaper and more reliable with a known expiration date that can be easily maintained.
I first heard of these from the ValuJet crash, but didn’t realize until reading this that the canisters standing by for emergency use are right there in the overhead compartments next to the masks, and there are a whole bunch of them (one for each mask compartment).
