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.
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.
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