Re: Explosive decompression - how fast?

: Michael Ash <mike@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
: he image of everything that's not nailed down flying out the door may be

: inaccurate, but the earlier estimate of 0.3m/s would appear to be 
: inaccurate as well. Perhaps the most famous explosive decompression 
: incident is Aloha Airlines 243 which suddenly lost a large section of
skin
: but managed to land safely. One flight attendant was thrown to the floor

: and another one was thrown out of the plane altogether, never to be seen

: again.

Sure, but that's what being exposed to 300+mph winds will get you.
Just the decompression, not so much.  It's the fact that so much
of the hull was peeled away.'

The mythbusters bit (iirc) was concerned with two aspects of a fairly
small hole.   First, will it suck everything inside towards it, and
second, will it rip the hull open and expose the interior to the airstream
(that is, will any small break in the skin necessarily spread very far).
And they concluded, no and no.  Of course, they were talking about 
a bullethole (again iirc).  But I doubt things would be much different
for anybody at a reasonable distance from, say, a hatch-sized hole.
An upper-half-of-the-hull-peels-away-in-a-section-tens-of-feet-long
sized hole is another matter entirely, and I doubt anybody will
notice the decompression, given the brisk breeze outside.


Wayne Throop   throopw@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
   http://sheol.org/throopw