Received this email from an old mate: (Anyone know the IL-76 system/able to verify these possibilities?)
"The doors opened including the ramp as the pressure system broke down," a military official told Reuters news agency.
"Everybody was sucked out."
Methinks no-one checked that the rear electrically activated door-locks were made before they got airborne - or that an electrical/wiring failure unmade them (or see further more likely possibility below in italics). The C130/C133/C141/C117 rear ramp upper doors are plug type (open inwards) and cannot open while pressurized. Petal doors such as on the IL76 aren't plug-type but wouldn't (like cargo-doors) be on a ground-bus that's safely deactivated airborne. Why not? Well because it's used for aerial drops and para-trooping just like C130's. So an active inflight bus plus non-plug petal-type doors? Lethal combo. A manufactured mishap.
I'm only guessing but it's probable that to open the doors the primary latchings would have been powered away but the doors would still be held closed (against indicator-light driving microswitches) by hydraulic pressure (and then reversed hyd pressure through the door-jacks would be required to open them at a damped rate/stop them fluttering in the breeze).
But if the electrical latching had failed (at some earlier date) due to an intermittent wiring fault, they'd probably not be aware of that. Why not? Well as long as the hyd system held the doors positively closed against the microswitches, those microswitches would keep the loadmaster's panel lights and the cockpit caution lights from illuminating. However once they then had the hyd system failure that these guys had, the latent defect in the primary locks meant that they wouldn't have been there as the (now effectively) "secondary" safety-latching system...... and the doors just blow open, courtesy of the differential, as the hyd pressure falls away.
Latent undetected faults are a real bitch....particularly when they only show up at the point where their system's performance is critical.
