I saw a movie with this scene and in that the hole create a pressure difference and the window explodes.
Is it true? As there’s already a small hole in airplane windows to maintain pressure.
Does size of the hole make such effect?
By Joe Buettner–
There would be a bullet sized hole in the window. That’s it.
Holes in planes aren’t nearly as catastrophic as movies portray them.
This happened last week from laptop sized bomb that got smuggled on a plane. The bomber was killed in the blast and some passengers were injured, but the plane obviously managed to land safely. Nobody got sucked out of the plane.
By Dave Aronson –
(First, let me clarify that I’m ass-u-me’ing that you mean on a decent-sized commercial flight, i.e., holding at least several dozen passengers.)
Depends. Are you in a movie?
If so, then a huge hole happens, pretty much half the side of the plane gets peeled away, everyone not belted in and everything not bolted down gets sucked out, the plane instantly nosedives out of control at ludicrous speed, and you are all DOOOOOOOOMED! Just about the only thing that doesn’t happen is a big fiery explosion… yet. That will happen on impact. (BTW most real-life explosions aren’t fiery like in the movies, either, nor does every vehicle impact result in an explosion or fire.)
If you’re not in a move, well then… not much. A small leak, which can easily be made up for by the enormous compression available from the engines powering the air supply.
As for the small hole already in the window, that doesn’t go all the way through. Plane windows have multiple panes. I’m a bit fuzzy on it, but if I remember rightly, that’s typically three panes, with a tiny hole in the middle pane, in order to help equalize pressure in stages between the inside and outside. The inside will be at higher pressure than the outside at altitude, but may be at lower pressure than the outside when it first lands, so they have some solutions that may not be intuitive.
Also, I’m not experienced in these matters, but I would guess that:
The flight deck crew may still get a notification of it and decide to take the plane down to a lower level, as a precaution. Meanwhile, they’ll also find out “what the heck that noise was”, contact traffic control, and find the nearest airport they can land at to have police/military/whatever waiting to remove whoever fired the gun.
Well at least that’s what would happen to the plane. What would happen to the person who fired the gun? He will be jumped by the passengers and crew. (Sixteen years ago, no, they would have complied with his demands, or if he was just in a shoot-out with another passenger, they’d try to duck. But not post-9/11.) He may get off a few more shots and kill or injure a few people, but he’ll be lucky to survive it himself. His best bet would be to immediately put down the gun, and claim it was some kind of accident… but he’d probably still be tied up, Just In Case.
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