Catastophic depressurization in a commercial airliner

"Ragnar" wrote in message ...
wrote in message
om...
We all have seen the movies were one pistol shot or what not causes
the side of an airliner explode sucking the people, seats, etc. into
the void. What would happen in the reality? Let's assume the plane is
at the cruising altitude.

A bullet hole is nothing. The cabin pressurization systems can handle it.
I had the bottom of a rear door seal (about two feet of seal) fail once, and
all it did was hiss until we threw a bunch of wet paper towels in the hole.

And if you lose a window, sure you'll get everything loose like paper and
small items blowing around, but a regular sized person isn't going to get
sucked out. Might seal up the hole pretty efficiently though.

I believe you are generally correct, but there have been exceptions.
ISTR the loss of a USAF crewmember on a C-130, the one engaged by
Peruvian aircraft in during a counterdrug mission, for example?
Subject to correction from anyone who knows what happened, I seem to
remember that a crewmember was sucked out of a rather small opening--I
have not found much about it, other than mention that the attack did
occur in April 1992. On the civil side, passengers have been lost when
they departed (in more ways than one) through not-that-much larger
fuselage openings created due to turbine failures.

Brooks

Hi

There was an incident involving an R.C.A.F. Station Namao-based S.A.C.
KC-135 Stratotanker back in 1961. (S.A.C. maintained a standing tanker
detachment at R.C.A.F. Station Namao, located just north of the city of
Edmonton, Alberta.

The aircraft had been involved in refueling a B-52 north of R.C.A.F.
Station Namao, when one of the windows blew out at altitude and
partially sucked one of the crew out of the aircraft. Apparently the
resulting trauma to his body allowed all the blood to be sucked out. I
talked to an old boomer who recalled the incident and said that when the
plane landed at Namao, there was a stream of frozen blood running along
the side of the fuselage.

Cheers...Chris