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 ...
DB Cooper bailed out of an aft stairway on a 727. He also demanded that the cabin remain unpressurized and he bailed out at a relatively low 10,000 feet, with the airplane travelling at a very slow 120 mph.
After DB Cooper used an airstair to escape from an aircraft in mid-air, Cooper vanes were installed to prevent an aft stair from being deployed in flight.
Well, goody for you, but I don't see how that's remotely relevant.
I still say that it's not a far stretch for an average Joe to think of the pressure on the inside pushing out, and if you are trying to DEBUNK something, you need to do more than just say "it's pressurized".
Yes, that was worded atrociously.
Cabin altitude is set to the altitude of the destination airport. But, airplane fuselages have a maximum pressure differential (between outside and inside). At a cruising altitude of 35,000 feet, that works out to a cabin altitude of about 8,000 feet.
The pressurization system will maintain the altitude at the destination airport in the cabin during climb-out, until it reaches the maximum pressure differential. Then, the cabin altitude will slowly climb. On descent, the reverse happens until the cabin altitude reaches the altitude at the destination airport.
Water landing is code for “debris field”....
Does anyone have a 10 foot pole, for not touching things with?
try to get a connecting flight out of John Wayne
The DB Cooper stairs were beyond the pressurized bulkhead. To access the air stairs you first have to open the door on the bulkhead which opens inward. If the aircraft were pressurized at the time DB would not have been able to open the door.
I know that. SO WHY DIDN"T THE AUTHOR SAY THAT ?
What a silly ranking, at least when considering overseas travel. That is like ranking Mexican prisons. Sure, some are better than others, but...
Airplanes rarely suffer a catastrophic structural failure and lose a wing or a control service and auger into the ground.
Even a complete loss of power at altitude is recoverable:
#6 is crap. Yes the air is circulated but if you are seated next to someone sneezing or hack their butt off guess what, you are breathing their air. It takes several minutes for the entire air flow of the cabin to be circulated. Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs fame did a show about a month ago and touched on this.
Most of the answers to this question are largely correct. Boeing, Douglas, and Airbus have always insisted that doors leading into the passenger cabin be ‘plugs.’ That is to say they are bigger than the opening. That’s why they have to be pulled inward and tilted to even fit through the opening. With even 1 psi of pressure, the strongest guy in the world can’t open one.
Where it gets a little more complicated is some of the smaller airliners like CRJs. Because many of them have fold out stairs at the front door, some of those doors are not plugs. Even at that, once they are closed, even a psi or two will bind up the mechanism so bad that they cannot be opened. And if you fly on these type of aircraft frequently you know that even unpressurized the doors sometimes cannot be opened or closed!
In a crash the pilots beat you to the scene of the impact...
“It’s called “Flying out of John Wayne Int’l Airport in Santa Ana California”.
Been there. Done that.
Manute Bolski is dead
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