Exploding curry menaces 747

Forget binary liquid explosives, a British Airways stewardess has shown how it's really done by popping her curry ready meal into a 747's club class microwave, with explosive results. The spicy blast - caused by the supermarket-bought nosh's inability to withstand the might of the double-strength airborne microwave - provoked …

[daniel]

Economy class nosh...

Maybe this will make BA provide better food for it's crew - and passengers ?

As if...

[Anonymous Coward]

Twice the power..

So, if the microwave oven installed on a jumbo is twice the power of a conventional oven, why not just use half the time?

Then again, they are airline stewardesses...

[Anonymous Coward]

protective pod

Maybe BA should look at enclosing the microwave area with the same material that erm, toilets are made of.

The loo can withstand the explosive blast from a morning-after deli-belly, so any other explosive force should be a doddle.

I see a revolution in body armour on the horizon....

[Anonymous Coward]

Fire extinguisher?

Everyone knows it's lager that's required to kill a curry

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah but...

After yet another incident of an exploding indian there is still no official word on weither the stewardess concerned will be charged under anti terrorism laws for possesion of an exploding ready meal with ricin.

[Andrew]

Also Lager kills..

Curry Monsters, specifically vindaloo beasts as seen on Red Dwarf

Microwave born new species? with all that super powered microoven malarkey

[Anonymous Coward]

"But this unfortunate incident has left us with egg on our faces."

Curried egg presumably.

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting...

that they can have a microwave that powerful on board,

but you still can't use gameboys on take off.

[Louis]

100ml liquid restriction..

How the hell did she get that amount of curry past security checks?! - It could have been filled with an explosive substance..

Saying that, I regularly create dirty bombs after eating micro-curry.

[Mike Landers]

Choice of words

"But this unfortunate incident has left us with egg on our faces."

With fried rice, presumably.

Says something for Club Class in-flight catering when the staff would rather have a microwave curry....

[Nick]

Polymorphic Curry Monster

I wonder if this was the creation of a 'Mutton Vindaloo Beast' ala Red-Dwarf was due to the super-microwaves altering the genetic makup of said asda-curry and creating a freakish mutant.

Now the BBC reporting that wifi networks are irradiating the children, perhaps they should be exterminated with fireextinguishers as well (just in case!).

[regadpellagru]

same power as ground based owens ?

"The missive notes that food intended for high-altitude reheating needs "special packaging" since the aircraft's ovens have twice the power output of your ground-based domestic model"

Well, then, why not changing those owens to anyone with a common power ?

We're all used to use the same microwave owen time for a given meal, thus, whenever we come across any turbocharged one, shit will happen.

Come on BA, just change the darn thing !

[Ross Fleming]

Can't use a gameboy...

You can use a whole host of electronic equipment on an aircraft (gameboy, laptop, personal audio player) with no ill effects.

The reason you can't use any of these devices during take-off and landing is little to do with interference with the aircraft's electronics. It's more to do with the fact that take-off and landing are the most incident-prone scenarios. You're much more likely to crash at this point (or rather, more likely to crash and be able to do something about it - such as evacuate the plane) and they don't want you distracted by anything.

Similarly the cabin lights are 'dimmed during take-off and landing' to allow your eyes to adjust to the outside light before evacuating to give you the best chance. Same theory applies to keeping the blinds up.

[Anonymous Coward]

Turbonuclearboxes

You're right, regadpellagru, we are generally used to nuke times for ground-based microwaves, but we're also not usually cooking for 3-400 people.

[Steve Oliver]

Ah memories

Reminds me of the time my dad tried to cook a Fray Bentos pie in the oven, without first taking the top off the tin.

[Anonymous Coward]

Silly comment

"that they can have a microwave that powerful on board,

but you still can't use gameboys on take off."

I don't expect the air stewardesses are in the kitchen preparing dinner at take off either...

[Daniel Ballado-Torres]

Overpower...

Hm... reminds me of my folly with Instant Oatmeal about 15 years ago.

Back then, most micro-ovens were about 400W ones. Ours decided to crap out back in '91. So my dad bought a brand new one... a 1000W one.

Too bad most timing instructions were for 400W ... I ended up with an ultra-hot, DRY oatmeal as most of the milk had boiled up. Then I checked the box, and read "1000W ovens - 40 seconds". I had set 2 minutes.

I have since learned to check out for different powered ovens. Sure those monster ovens have at least some warning about being over-powered??

[Matthew Sinclair]

sounds like an RTFM

So let me guess.... TSA will take the hint and bann curry from all airlines... right?

: O )

8 O )

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: sounds like an RTFM

"So let me guess.... TSA will take the hint and bann curry from all airlines... right?"

Think about it - a couple of hundred people in a pressurised tin can, even if a small fraction of them have the curry then that's going lead to a pretty, erm, thick atmosphere in short order. Not the thing I'd care to contemplate on a long-haul flight ;-)

So, maybe it's not such a bad idea after all :-)

I would make a comment about the Red Dwarf vindaloo monster but world+dog have beaten me to it.

[Alexander Vollmer]

Packaging problem?

Might be a curry with a special foil for a roasting effect?

These foils have a strange behaviour if you exceed their radiation limits. Parts of these multilayers change their condition from solid to gas and that results in bubbles on the foil or with a heavy duty oven in bubbles on the oven ... the kitchen ... the plane?

Didn't try it with a curry, but own a 2000W and have seen the bubbles on foil. Another effect was that wet rice in a closed plastic bag on full power for 1:30 ends also in an explosion of pop rice opening the ovens door, stopping the waves and ... no damage, except the *** on the floor.

Mostly happens in a hurry not with a curry.

[Anonymous Coward]

Bad childhood memories

Reminds me of the time where I tried boiling a cup of tea in a microwave. Problem was, it was an aluminum cup. The instructions for the machine dictates that one should not put anything aluminum in it unless operating in convection mode, but I was too tired to think.

The cup ended up with some pretty nasty dents on it, the plastic top of the cup literally disintegrated, and the microwave had to undergo a few hundred dollars of repair (this was back when microwaves just started going on sale in Malaysia and costs some two to four thousand Malaysian ringgits - especially for the large one we had, so buying a new one was not an option).

And I got quite an earful and a good spanking from my mom for doing that, too. I was just nine then.

Surprisingly, tho, the microwave is still serving my family after all these years.

[Anonymous Coward]

Blame BA

Why was this young lady not trained to a simple but better standard?

Example,Water boils at given temp on the ground, what temp at 38.000'

How is it that crew are even allowed to take there own food on board???

[Anonymous Coward]

Should've set

the doors to manual......

[Ishkandar]

re. blame BA

Err....it's not so simple as that. The plane is usually pressurised for 8000 feet NOT 38000 feet. Otherwise everyone will be on Oxygen continuously since the air up there is too thin to breathe. And the boiling of water is dependant on the pressure - PV/T - as in pressure cookers, given the same volume. Climbers of very tall mountains have the same problem.