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 ...
4. Planes dump human waste while in air.
5. You can get stuck on a plane toilet if you flush while sitting down.
6. Recirculated air in planes spreads disease.
7. Wearing your seat belt can hurt your chances of surviving a plane crash.
8. Pilots can control airflow to keep passengers sedated and save on fuel.
9. Oxygen masks are decoys, meant to keep passengers calm before a crash.
10. You have no chance of surviving a plane crash.
11. Flying is safer than driving
While that might be true, it's a sorry,sorry explanation.
The pressure is on the INSIDE, pushing OUT. It's not a far stretch to think that the pressure would HELP you open the door, not hinder you.
To explain it by saying that "it's pressurized" shows a complete lack of understanding of the problem.
12. An airplane hit the pentagon.
12. Yelling ‘Allahu Akbar!’ will make the plane crash............
12. Objects heavier than air can’t fly.
Do the doors open ‘IN’ or ‘OUT’?.....
“9. Oxygen masks are decoys, meant to keep passengers calm before a crash.
ROFLMAO!!! I LOVE that one!
Especially take-offs, and rough landings.
LOVE those in air "drops" (don't know what you call them ... but your gizzard slides up into your brain)
#3 is true, but only because the stews can bring the drinks faster.
/johnny
/johnny
(((Ping)))
Airplane doors are designed such that they have to be pulled inwards (into the cabin), then rotated, and then pushed out the hatch.
The article is correct.
14- don’t eat the fish. Have the lasagna.
After the crash landing of Asiana Flight 214, it seemed incredible that 304 of 307 people on board survived. But that's in line with numbers from the National Transportation Safety Board, which show that 95% of passengers involved in accidents on US carriers between 1983 and 2000 survived.
A little misleading. Most of these are botched LANDINGS OR TAKEOFFS, where the plane is still relatively close to the ground. A failure from cruising altitude or with several hundred feet of altitude is almost impossible to survive, even over water.
So why wouldn't a writer, trying to explain why it won't happen, point that out?
Assuming you don't notice that airplane doors are designed to open inward then rotate to the outside. You would have to overcome the pressure to open the door inward before you could push it to the outside.
ROTFL!
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