I'm so dizzy !!!
 

When meeting flights on airbridges , I notice an awful lot of people who become disorientated and "fall" slightly to one side when stepping off an aircraft onto the airbridge .. Anybody know what a cause of this would be ?

Wobbles
 

May be because the balancing mechanism in thier ears has become acclimatized to the motion of the a/c.

Have you ever disembarked a boat to find yourself swaying back and forth on dry land.

The motion of an a/c is slightly different, however I think it would still be possible to produce a similar effect.
:yuk:

As a pax I've noticed that the airbridges don't really seem to have been designed with todays' smaller aircraft in mind, and when the L shaped bridges are at their lowest (e.g. Bae146 on a stand designed for anything up to widebody), the floor is often far from level. Do these dizzy pax always seem to fall to their left? Just a thought.

As a very experienced Pax i can tell you it's because your arse has flattened out so much from sitting so long without movement. It's difficult to put one foot in front of the other thus the waddle effect.

Coriolis.

They sway the opposite way in the southern hemisphere.

Honest ! :rolleyes:

;)

Anyone ever get a weird sensation, say like the night after you've come off a flight (or even a ferry trip) and you'll be in bed and you feel as if you're swaying as you walk down the aisle of the plane.

Maybe its just me, but it lasts a day or two on occasions.

When did you last have a medical?

Perhaps a few too many refreshing beverages?

The bridge platform is always much lower than the sill of the door. Also, the lighting in side them is often lower than in the cabin, so you have two adjustments to make at the same time.

Of course, some of my fellow pax stagger because of the 65kgs of hand luggage they are carrying. :rolleyes:

Interesting if it's something to do with the motion... how does the inner ear respond to, say, an approach with a crosswind? Can it sense that it's pointed in one direction and moving in another over the ground?

On the whole the squished arse/refreshing beverage theories look more plausible though. :)

If they're disembarking from the low-costers, it's probably because they've hit their head on the overhead (no it's not) locker at row one. There is no bulkhead there to prevent it.

Penguina,

The inner ear senses accelerations. The three semi-circular canals are at right angles to each other, and therefore can detect accelerations in all three axes, and the brain can resolve these signals into a resultant direction of the acceleration. However, as soon as the acceleration stops, regardless of how fast you're going, the fluids in the canals run back to the lowest part of the canal, and so you don't feel the speed. the system is not particularly sensitive, as aeromed people can demonstrate with a 'spin chair'. You sit in a pivoted office chair with a blindfold on and the chair is very gently spun, with a very slow acceleration. This 'sub-threshold acceleration' is not quick enough to displace the fluid from its resting position so you think you're not moving. Once they've got the chair spinning quickly they suddenly stop it. The fluid sloshes violently in the other direction under the deceleration. Your brain, having not known you were moving before, interprets this as a violent acceleration in the opposite direction. So to sum up, they spin the chair to the right; you think you're stationary. They stop it quickly; you are convinced you're spinning rapidly to the left. They tell you to take the blindfold off-you fall over!

As an aside, an aeromed guy once told me that one of the reasons you get dizzy when drunk is that these fluids are quite thick. Alcohol gets into them and thins them out, so they slosh around more. So your inner ear tells your brain you're moving much more than your eyes tell your brain. Result: motion sickness!

In response to your crosswind question, the crosswind doesn't create an acceleration, so I don't think you would feel it. You would sense a powerful sideways gust, though.

It's similar as when one stands up after a lengthy hot bath.

You must have a big bath to need an airbridge.