DEBUNKED: 10 Airplane Myths That People Still Believe

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.

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.

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...

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."

Given your frame of reference, I understand where you are coming from with your question. But I can unequivocally tell you that there are much greater factors affecting fuel consumption other than cabin temperature setting. By far, an aircraft’s change in altitude is going to affect fuel flow because of the variance in air density and therefore the fuel/air ratio.

I have a three hour flight tomorrow from Texas to the eastern Caribbean. I’ll put your theory to the test with extreme but brief changes in the selected cabin temperature. Hey, I can’t tick off the boss’s family sitting in the back now, can I?

Thanks oxcart. Another myth is, when catastrophic failure happens in airliners, there must be foul play involved. Hell, there's a whole cottage industry from that one.

During the climb, the crew made preparations to detour around thunderstorms along the aircraft's track; anticipating turbulence, the captain kept the seatbelt sign lit. After the plane had been flying for approximately 16 minutes, and was passing between 22,000 and 23,000 feet (6,700–7,000 m), a grinding noise was suddenly heard in the business-class section, followed by a loud thud which rattled the whole aircraft. One and a half seconds later, the forward cargo door blew out abruptly. The door swung out with such force that it was forced past its normal stop and slammed the side of the fuselage, busting it open. Pressure differentials and aerodynamic forces caved in the cabin floor, causing ten seats (G and H of rows 8 through 12), as well as an individual seated in 9F whose armrest failed, to be ejected from the cabin. All 9 passengers seated in these locations were killed (seats 8G and 12G were unoccupied).[1] A gaping hole was left in the aircraft and a flight attendant in the Business Class cabin was almost pulled out of the airplane and was seen by passengers and fellow crew members clinging to a seat leg; they were able to pull her to safety inside the cabin, although she was severely injured. Another flight attendant in the Business Class Cabin hung on to the steps leading to the upper deck, and was dangling from them when the decompression occurred... The accident was most likely caused by improper wiring and deficiencies in the door's design... As early as 1975, Boeing realized the aluminum locking sectors were of too thin a gauge to be effective and recommended the airlines add doublers to the locking sectors. In 1987 Pan Am Flight 125 outbound from London Heathrow Airport encountered pressurization problems at 20,000 feet (6,100 m), causing the crew to abort the flight and return to the airport. After the safe landing, the aircraft's cargo door was found to be ajar by about 1.5 inches (3.8 cm) along its ventral edge... The aircraft was successfully repaired, re-registered as N4724U in 1989, and returned to service with United Airlines in 1990. In 1997, the aircraft was registered with Air Dabia as C5-FBS[12] and abandoned in 2001 during overhaul maintenance at Plattsburgh International Airport.[13]

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