Thanks for those great photo blow ups you guys. I continually marvel at your photo high-res skills. Composites are good stuff if they are not damaged. Carbon fiber by itself won't work good for tension loads, hence Kevlar is added to the pressure vessel of little aircraft like the pressurized lancair IV.
(To the best of my memory. Feel free to correct me.)
Click on this link to see what composite aviation oxygen bottles look like:
SCI
Note the ridges on the side of the bottles from this vender.
Breathable aviation O2 tanks are supposed to be green, I know. For some reason, in the 80's, our composite bottles were white and racked horizontal inboard of the frames in a cluster, not stored against the aircraft skin like you see in the previous space saving photos. But putting them in the side wall of the cargo compartment probably gives this -400 more lower cargo positions; I don't know.
But we are talking about millions and millions of flight hours over decades without a single known cylinder explosion. Kind of looks like a little charing on that last photo blow up. But no way to know which came first.....
Let's revisit the known Leak problem for a minute:
I think it's important to recall that the "shards" so far that we have been hearing about are not talking about actual bottle material, right? Just attached hardware like regulators etc which could have been leaking and snaked their way to a [fuel & ignition] source. So it doesn't necessarily matter whether the leak came from the crew or pax systems in that scenario, it only matters that the oxygen collected in the compartment down near the hull, got in contact with a [fuel & ignition source like a venting battery in the E&E compartment] and blew out the lower 42 skin while also buckling the floor upwards.
The intact missing oxygen bottle (which got sucked through the wall) is now being used by a chinese brain surgeon who bought it at the fish market having spotted it in the netting.
One thing's for sure: Just in case that's wrong, I'll have to start wearing my flack jacket when I stow away down there from now on.....
