"Doug \"Woody\" and Erin Beal" wrote in message news:

I watched a portion of Myth Busters where the two knuckleheads tried to
debunk the "explosive decompression" phenomenon in the movies. You get the
picture. Gun goes off in plane. Fuselage rips open and 6-8 passengers, in
flight meals, luggage, and an unsuspecting flight attendant fly into the
atmosphere.

They pressurized a bone-yarded fuselage with a huffer and used a remote
control .45 to shoot out windows and fuselage to see if a large hole would
expand out the small starter hole.

Results: Small holes stayed small and made hissing noises.

Conclusion: Myth. Busted.

They failed, however, to introduce a 300/.78 slipstream into the equation,
but I doubt it would have changed the result.

Point being that these guys seem to make some critical assumptions that
*might* affect the results. I didn't see the whole show, but I don't
remember them ever addressing the lack of slip stream.

--Woody


Next time you're out here (yea right) I'll show you some video of our
recent tests. We did our own series of tests and recreated the vital
conditions. The conclusions are the same as you stated. Explosive
decompressions are great for the movies, not realistic though.

BlackBeard