Re: Explosive decompression - how fast?

Brian Davis <brdavis@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> On Apr 27, 12:29?am, Michael Ash <m...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> 
>>>: One flight attendant was thrown to the floor and another
>>>: one was thrown out of the plane altogether, never to be seen
>>>: again.
> 
> It would seem odd to start with a single sentence mentioning a person
> being "thrown the the floor" and use it as a supporting statement that
> the *other* person was "accelerated away be decompression-related
> forces". It certainly doesn't rule it out, but it points out the
> problems associated with taking news blurbs as starting assumptions.

I'm not sure what news blurbs you're referring to. Here is a direct quote 
from the NTSB report:

"This was a survivable accident; the fatality was the result of the 
explosive nature of the decompression. The flight attendant was swept 
violently from the airplane and passed through an opening of jagged 
metal."

It is of course entirely possible that the NTSB got this wrong, but it 
would seem that *they* think it was the decompression, not the subsequent 
airflow, which pulled her out. No news mistakes involved.

(This report was sort of hard to find; at least, hard compared to my 
Google-era expectations of instant access to all. If anyone else wants to 
refer to it, you can find it at 
<http://amelia.db.erau.edu/reports/ntsb/aar/AAR89-03.pdf>.)

As for the bit about being thrown to the floor, humans tend to fall down 
when experiencing significant unexpected lateral accelerations. Two (not 
one as I had stated previously) were knocked to the floor and one was 
ejected. They were at different positions in the body of the plane and so 
experienced different forces due to the event.

-- 
Michael Ash
Rogue Amoeba Software