... Explosive Decompression....

James

Your right. Hitting a bird can cause major structural damage to an
aircraft.

What a few were talking about was a bullet causing explosive
decompression and loss of the aircraft. All I was trying to point out
was that taking out the windscreen with a bird did not cause loss of
aircraft so why would a 'little old bullet' cause loss?

Sometimes you can't argue with the flat earth people.

On mythbusters, they showed that if you land in a pumpkin patch be
careful as you can break things G

One time I saw results of marshmallows that were fired at things and
the damage they caused.


Big John
Pilot ROCAF



On Mon, 19 Jan 2004 08:33:38 -0600, "James M. Knox"
wrote:

Big John wrote in
:

Have see the results of aircraft hitting birds, 1 to 10 lbs, and
taking out the cockpit canopy. Unless the carcass hit the pilot and
caused major damage to him, all the aircraft I know of (over 55 years)
have been flown back and landed ok.

Fine, but how many shots into the windscreen would it take to
destroy a plane going 500 mph at 30,000 ft?

Watched the Mythbusters episode last night on Discovery Channel. They had
a Piper Cherokee with nothing front of the firewall. Fired frozen and
thawed chickens at it - smashed right through the thin plexi of course,
even with the "gun" set at low power. [In fact, basically any power
setting that got the chicken to the aircraft smashed the windscreen.]

What amazed me was later when they hit the firewall with a pumpkin -
smashed the whole front end of the Cherokee.

-----------------------------------------------
James M. Knox
TriSoft ph 512-385-0316
1109-A Shady Lane fax 512-366-4331
Austin, Tx 78721
-----------------------------------------------