Posted on 09/25/2012 9:15:32 AM PDT by pabianice
In its latest edition, we get this from the nitwits at "Scientific American":
" Why Airplane Windows Don't Roll Down
"Were you to open a plane window, the compressed air inside would rapidly rush out, atmospheric conditions inside and outside the plane would equalize, and everybody would die."
I don't know what grammer school kid wrote this for Scientific American, but after I stopped laughing, I had to call it.
"At 35,000 ft. (11,000 m), the typical altitude of a commercial jet, the air pressure drops to less than a quarter of its value at sea level, and the outside temperature drops below negative 60 degrees Fahrenheit (negative 51 degrees Celsius), according to The Engineering Toolbox. Exposed to such conditions, you would quickly die.".
Short answer: NO. For those of us who actually know something about aviation and who may have gone through military flight training, when you lose atmospheric compression, everyone has an enormous fart, your ears hurt, your pen lets lose in your flight suit pocket, there is an instantaneous fogging of the cabin, and it does get very loud and cold but you have time to grab your O2 mask or close the hatch and re-ressurize. You do NOT explode like in a bad sci fi movie, or get sucked out into space like Goldfinger. You do NOT instantly die. You DO have about 25 seconds to put on your mask or make other arrangements. You die only if you work for "Scientific American."
Nitwits.
More evidence SA is not much of an objective digest of science and technology any more. Their first foray into becoming a populist rag was globull warming support.
Now they become even more of a political commentary.
Pitiful.
The collective intelligence of all that have voted for or still support Obuggery is substantially less than a bag of hammers.
SA. Seriously? You should be ashamed to include “scientific” in your title. Do you REALLY believe that Romney is that stupid? Try looking in the mirror. Morons! You don’t understand what he meant? Who’s the mensa genius running your outfit.
Helping keep mankind warm for 65 years. (do you think SA will understand that?) Never mind, probably not.
Er, not to get in the way of a good rant, but I didn’t see anything in the text you highlighted that suggested they were saying you would “die instantly.” They said that if you were exposed to these conditions, you would die quickly (which you would). The oxygen masks exist to make sure that you AREN’T exposed to these conditions for more than a few seconds.
As an ex fighter jock, I confirm that FR readers are a lot more informed than the Scientific Muslim...er...American loons.
I quit getting their joke of a magazine years ago.
That’s true. If the cabin depressurized at 35k, everyone who votes for Obama would sit there passively, O2 masks dangling in front of them, waiting for a government worker to come and help, so yes, they would all die.
about 10 years ago I quick taking SA because of it’s turn away from science to political science. Complete rag sheet
I own an airplane that has a proper roll down window. But, also, many Part 25 Transports have windows that can be opened in flight.
http://www.pprune.org/tech-log/424078-why-open-cockpit-window.html
BTW, he said “Open”, “Roll Down” is incorreclty inferred.
That’s about right.
And I’m sure their last dying thought as they sat there staring at the dangling masks would be “Wah! Romney got more than his fair share of oxygen!”
It would be nice if there was a way, once the plane was not moving, to pop the windows open if there is a fire inside the cabin.
That would help prevent suffocation deaths.
Even a small fire could kill a lot of people in a plane by smoke inhalation, if the fire took out the ventilation.
Of course, the chance of that is very low compared to the risk of having windows that could be forced open, so trade-offs are made. That doesn’t mean we can’t say that it would be nice if you could.
We do have removable windows in the center of the craft, to help people escape onto the wing. SO it’s not a stupid idea. And yes, if someone manages to open one of those in flight, or to open the doors, we would have decompression.
This was actually a hit piece on Romney. He was joking with the press (according to a pool reporter) but SA and its readers assumed he was serious.
Note that the oxygen mask doesn’t prevent ANY of the conditions they mention, EXCEPT for the lack of oxygen.
So apparently, the cold and the lack of pressure aren’t going to kill you very quickly. There is time for the pilot to bring the plane down to a safe altitude, so long as you can keep oxygen to your lungs.
SO I would call their rant “mostly false”.
If Romney called himself “eye candy” or said a terrorist attack was a “bump in the road”, the MSM would crucify him
In their zeal to attack Romney Scientific American used statistics for a “Commercial” airliner. Ann Romney was on a 10 passenger corporate jet (Canadair CL-600 Challenger 601). I’m no scientist but I am pretty sure they are not the same.
Now I can't stand to even look at it.
A shame, really.
The whorenalists are are beclowning themselves all over
One of the scariest things to happen in an airplace is for it to fill with smoke
You cant see your instruments, you can’t see outside the windows, you cant breathe... if it is bad enough you are going to die unless you can normally land a plane with your eyes closed
The oxygen masks are basically for passenger comfort. Passengers can be exposed for two full minutes to complete depressurization. This is from the FAA. They also specify (like they would need to anyway) that this requires an emergency descent.
It’s critical that the flight crew mask up fast. But the passengers can sleep and will wake up fine after the emergency descent.
hee hee... I didnt know about the enormous fart part
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_of_useful_consciousness
You have under a minute at 35K feet to get on oxygen.
At the typical max altitude of airliners, you have just a few seconds.
No, their first foray into becoming a populist rag was when they ran a two-page ad/article praising Les Aspin when he was a pro-nuclear-disarmament member of congress, back in the mid-1970s.
They then proceeded to publish a series of papers by a number of anti-Pershing missile, anti-SBI professors (many of whom - e.g. Kosta Tsipis - were on the MIT faculty).
These items, starting with the Aspin piece, had nothing to do with "science" per se. They were strictly bandstands for moral posturing on the part of "one world" elite opinion leaders.
Me too, but it hasn't been for the past 20 years or so. My wife gave me a "Discover" subscription for my birthday and its got the same dishonest liberal disease -- a "global warming" reference in nearly every article. Ditto National Geographic and most other periodicals these days.
I used to enjoy trout fishing and occasionally I'd subscribe to one of the outdoor magazines to catch up on the latest equipment technology, etc. It's over 20 years ago now but I recall ordering one of the major mags (can't recall which one now). The lead article was a "buddy" story about lesbians fishing in Montana. I canceled my subscription and haven't picked one of those mags up since. The cultural rot runs deep.
Out of the gate, this meme is a lie...he never said they wouldn’t ‘roll down’...he said they won’t ‘open’. The rolled down slant is meant to make him look stooopid....but I suspect Mr. Romney has been on an airplane or two in his life.
And considering the plane LANDED, he may have been musing about why there is no way to vent the plane, once it goes below 12k feet...instead of waiting for the landing, and complete stop of the plane....which actually wouldn’t be a bad idea.
Yesterday, Mooochelle talked about her ancestors ‘riding’ the underground railroad...an even more stupid comment, that was not commented on one bit by the media.
The math, science and engineering professors I encountered in college were logical, apolitical in the classroom, and I suspect, may have been conservative. I cannot confirm that because they stuck to the subject matter.
The math, science and engineering professors I encountered in college were logical, apolitical in the classroom, and I suspect, may have been conservative. I cannot confirm that because they stuck to the subject matter.
When I was growing up in the 60’s my Dad (a chemist) had every copy of SA going back to maybe 1960. I sat up at night and devoured them, to the extent I could understand them. There were plenty of articles I could not understand, of course. But every issue had at least two articles that fascinated me and usually prodded me to go looking for more information about stuff I became interested in.
I look at SA now and it’s generally scholarly research into prefabricated conclusions. It’s all about global warming as an assumed conclusion. It is anything but classical science. It is liberal advocacy disguised as objective research and it’s laughably puerile.
I sympathize about the cultural rot being found in what should be completely innocuous magazines. I had received the first issue of a cooking magazine that features recipes from real American families. Of course, they had a “family” of two gay males with children. Yes, it was that important to preach to the readers.
I”m glad my parents aren’t around to see this.
Once a great magazine-not for everyone, but a great magazine; now, dumbed-down PC bumwipe.
Reminds me of a Southwest Airlines flight I once took. During the safety lecture before the flight took off, we were told how to put on the oxygen masks, and if you're flying with a small child, to put your mask on first, and then help your child. And if you're flying with more than one child, decide in advance which is your favorite!
Mark
The oxygen masks would do little good at 35,000 feet. The low pressure and temperature would cause many other problems.
The problem with Romney is that he assumes that voters are intelligent. Fortunately, he’s mostly right. He misses the fact, though, that most of the press aren’t. Anyone so stupid that he must have a joke such as this explained, is usually too stupid to understand the joke anyway. “Scientific” American fits this category.
As much as I understand your annoyance with this publication, it is a little misleading to post a vanity and make it look like it came from “Scientific American”.
BTW, it’s “grammar” not “grammer”.
Now, now, I'm sure at least one of her forebearers took a subway ride at least once...
But those are built so that the air pressure difference is holding the door in place. The difference between the cabin pressure (around 5000 feet altitude equivalent) and the atmosphere at 40000 feet would be about 10 pounds per square inch. A typical emergency exit would have about 4 tons of pressure holding it in place. I'm not going to pop it open to get a little bit of a breeze.
What’s so telling is how readily the libtards jumped on it. They love to make something out of nothing. SA has lost ALL credibility.
I recall a airliner flying over the Pacific some 20 years ago lost a large section of ceiling (no oxygen masks for scores of passengers) and a flight attendant who was standing in the aisle as it happened. The aircraft landed safely with that one loss of life.
That was Hawaiian Airlines. They flew at relatively low levels between the islands. The many, many press-depress cycles simply bent the fuselage until it broke open.
In Germany in the early 1930’s, doctors, lawyers, and “scientists” were the most dangerous Nazis.
Just sayin’ ...
Is SA trying to tell me that the guy would have died if he had tried that?
Correct. Nor do we need to open the windows for air before we are on the ground.
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