Posted on 09/26/2013 12:03:19 PM PDT by oxcart
Flying can be a mysterious experience: Planes are incredibly complicated, even scary machines, and pilots and flight attendants don't tell you too much about what's going on.
So it makes sense that people believe all sorts of interesting "facts" about air travel.
The problem is, a lot of them aren't true.
From "you get drunk faster in the air" to "the air in planes is riddled with germs," here are 10 airplane myths that needed to be debunked.
1. Opening a plane door while in flight is a real safety risk.
It isn't. When the plane is at cruising altitude, it's pressurized. That pressure means that getting a door open would require superhuman strength.
To quote Patrick Smith, an airline pilot, blogger, and author of Cockpit Confidential: "You cannot – repeat, cannot – open the doors or emergency hatches of an airplane in flight. You can’t open them for the simple reason that cabin pressure won’t allow it."
So don't worry about the occasional passenger going nuts and everyone flying out of the plane as the result of an opened door, it isn't going to happen. Which leads us to the next myth...
2. A small hole in a plane will lead to everyone being sucked right out.
Patrick Smith notes that while bombs and large-scale structural failures can cause disastrous, rapid decompression, a small hole in a plane's fuselage is a different matter.
After a foot-long breach in an Alaska Airlines MD-80 plane led to an emergency descent in 2006, Smith wrote in his Salon column: "The breach was a small one, and once the cabin pressure had escaped, it could be reasonably assumed that the plane was going to stay in one solid piece and fly just fine. Which it did."
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
I was flying on a commercial flight, seated to a young attractive gal who was really nervous. White-knuckle nervous.
She was just starting to chill out when the jet hit some turbulence.
“What was that!” She asked.
I replied “We ran over a dog.”
“Awwwe. Poor thing!”
A couple minutes later she said, “Wait a minute!”
The pilot is trained to throttle up when this happens to get above Mach 1.0001, so then you have to keep the same guy from running back to his seat from the front of the plane and blowing them out again. ;^)
Most of us have only flown inside them.
In the event of a water landing your seat cushions may be used as a flotation device.
The outside temperatures are really low, all you need to do is have one window open just a crack and it will cool the whole plane.
I didn't mean to turn it off, just turn it down.
-PJ
LOL...I don't care. If I hear that, I take no chances.
I've only had one really bad landing (hard enough to pop some overhead compartments open). I was ready to ask the pilot if he was from the Navy and whether he caught the third wire, but he and the copilot hid in the cockpit while the passengers stumbled off the plane.
After that landing I always made sure to keep my tongue away from my teeth on landing so I don't bite it.
Hahahahahaha...I love this thread!
What is the percentage of people who survive plane crashes versus the percentage of people who survive car crashes?
My buddy and I were on a 727 headed north off the Florida Atlantic coast.
We were looking landwards, and beyond the thunderclouds all the way up the coast, the sun was getting ready to set. We could see lightning flashes all over the place. I was enjoying it.
We had just all been served drinks, and they announced they weren’t going to serve meals they just finished preparing because it would be unsafe. (I recall it was either turkey or salisbury steak)
So, my buddy and I have our trays down with our drinks on them (I had a Seven and Seven...I think) and the plane hit a couple of pockets. Not too bad. My drink, which was right near the brim began to spill, so I put my mouth down and drank a mouthful without lifting it. Almost none spilled.
I thought I was mighty clever, chuckled, then we hit another, deeper pocket.
This time, some sloshed out. I picked it up, took a big mouthful, swallowed it and turned to my buddy.
As I turned, I was looking at his sloshing drink and saying “Hey, you better drink that, or you’ll be wearing it!”
Except I didn’t.
As I turned and my eyes fixed on his drink, the plane plummeted.
I had that entire comment already perfectly formed in my head, and it was just up to my mouth to finish saying it but all I got out of that entire sentence above was: “Hey...”
What is burned into my memory is astonishing, at least to me. As my eyes fixed on his drink, the drink suddenly leaped into the air.
It was like watching a cartoon. The cup seemed to stay where it was, and the entire volume of his drink shot out of it in the perfectly formed shape of the cup. I think it was only a minuscule fraction of a second, but my brain seemed to slow it right down to the “super slow motion bullet hitting the balloon filled with milk” speed.
Then everything sped right up to what seemed like hyper speed, and things began to happen really fast.
The plane plummeted far enough that my mind had time to completely form and process the thought: “I am not going to panic. Not yet. But if this plane keeps dropping...I just might.”
And then the plane settled out
One woman was injured in the bathroom, and another who was ejected from her seat into the overhead. I saw that only in the dark edge of my peripheral vision. I didn’t see it directly, but the speed and force at which she was ejected from her seat and violently smashed into the luggage bins above her was clearly evident in what my brain registered.
They made an emergency landing and carted them both off in stretchers.
One interesting side note was how people on the plane changed after that. All over the plane, people were talking to complete and total strangers as if they had known them their entire lives. It was amazing. The other detail is all the stuff that rained down on us for the remainder of that flight. All kinds of liquid, booze, beer, soda, brown gravy (from the galley) dripped down on us. There was a little river in the aisle area. It seemed like such a minor thing that at another time, people would have raised holy hell if one drop of gravy had fallen down to soil a shirt. But as everyone made their acquaintance with the strangers around them, nobody seemed to notice it.
While we drank our complimentary drinks, my buddy said to me that in that time as the plane fell, he also had time to process a thought (as I had) and when he hit the point where he might panic, he had a flash of a vision for a split second.
He said he envisioned himself in that split second, strapped into his seat in a section of fuselage at the bottom of the ocean with his hair swaying in the current, his eyes open. That was how he described it. Pretty gripping vision. Then, as if he had said too much, he made a deliberate and loud “Blub. Blub” sound as he gently moved his head side-to-side. We both cracked up and sucked down our complimentary drinks...:)
But I will say, he was dead serious as he initially described it. I think I saw it just as vividly as he did, but...of course, when I remember it now, it makes me grin rather than feel grim. When the memory pops into my mind now, before it has a chance to register as a corpse strapped in a watery grave, like someone who always screws up the punch line of a joke by skipping right to it, I always get to the face of my best friend with the “Blub. Blub.” that follows, and just cannot take it seriously!
If "It's Pressurized" is such a good explanation, then how come everybody else is explaining it to me in SOME OTHER WAY?
It's a gas ain't it?
“Would you design an airplane that would give the FAs any control of pressurization?”
That was the point of my post.
Thank you for underscoring my point.
I have not flown the 747. I am typed in the 737 but most recently I have been flying corporate jets. Some of those jets have an electrically driven air conditioner. When it activates, you can definitely see an increase in amperage, so I assume there would be a slight increase in fuel flow, but it doesn’t show on the fuel flow gauges. The other corporate jets I fly have what is called an air cycle machine. We shut the air conditioner portion of it off at 18,000 feet. At that point we are trying to heat the air for creature comfort, not cool it. Temperatures in the upper flight levels are easily minus thirty to minus fifty centigrade.
Their explanations are simplified because you seem to need that approach in order to understand what most of us understood at the first reading of the post. It is how we explain things to our young children. It is holding your hand to lead you to knowledge that you seem to lack. Sorry, but that is what it is!
The combustion engine charges the high-voltage battery and the 12-volt battery, as well as propels the car too. The car gets 40+ MPG overall, but the combustion engine alone only performs at a max of 20 MPG because it's energy is also used for charging the other batteries.
The more that I run the a/c in the car, the less MPG I get because the engine is spending more energy recharging the batteries (and consuming more gasoline), because they drain faster with the a/c on than when the a/c is off. That means that less gasoline is being devoted to propulsion.
In jets, especially during times of high fuel prices, what I read was that running the heaters for creature comfort used more fuel than running the heaters at minimum comfort levels until someone complained. I guess the question is whether the extra fuel consumption is noticeable or negligible.
-PJ
Cooper bailed out below 10K.
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