Why airplane doors can't be opened mid-flight | Hacker News Reader

Why airplane doors can't be opened mid-flight

everything2.com

38 pointsmattyb29 comments

I notice this is the second submission by mattyb from everything2.com tonight.

As cool as everything2.com is, if anyone reading this has remotely any work to do within the next two days, don't start traversing the tree of links from interesting everything2 nodes. I say this because I learned, from experience, that if you have tabbed browsing and open on average >1 new tab per page while traversing a site like everything2, your backload of reading material will grow exponentially and your procrastination problem, if you have one, will similarly grow to epic proportions.

I fear mattyb has been sucked into this trap.

Apologies if this comment is not productive enough.

About five years ago, I managed to read all of Everything2 (or at least managed to circumnavigate an entire subgraph until I no longer found any of the remaining outbound links interesting.) It took two weeks. It would probably take even longer now.

I did the same thing with the TV Tropes[1] wiki, even further back; it actually caused me to "queue" so many open tabs at a time that the browser would crash on restore (I think it was about 800, spread out across several windows, that did the trick.) I finally started queueing using bookmarks instead of opened tabs; it was much more annoying to do, but I managed to conquer that site as well.

[1] http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HomePage — only click if you're a competitor to a YC venture. ;)

My hat is off to you, sir. After spending a greater part of my past week's evenings playing Diablo II, I can't help but appreciate level grinding of a decidedly more cerebral nature.

I have to say, though: I don't remember any of it off-hand. At some point in a "mind grind," your brain stops absorbing information from short-term into long-term memory, although you still retain the ability to make new short-term memories, so you still feel like you're "learning," even though it will all disappear sooner rather than later.

I spent an entire weekend on TVTropes in exactly the manner you described.

By now, I've probably now read over half the site. Doesn't help that my favorite TV and game series are some of the most trope overdosed ever created.

If you restore a browser session with 800 tabs mostly on the same server, wouldn't that be 800 simultaneous requests which would look like a DOS attempt by a security system?

Browsers usually limit themselves to 4 simultaneous requests at a time to the same server.

> About five years ago, I managed to read all of Everything2

It would probably take you a few years to read all of e2. There are currently 442,874 writeups. 5 years ago there were much more. Place has changed a lot. Doesn't have the same sense of community and freedom as before. Shame really, as it was a great place to hang out. I've made some lifelong friends thought e2.

Unless you're posting from beyond the grave, how do you know they will be (were?) lifelong friends?

Who says I'm not posting from beyond the grave?

I was careful to allow for that very possibility ...

I have a bookmarking problem...~17000 "To be read later" bookmarks in Instapaper. Mostly from this @#%! site.

I had already bookmarked the >50 tabs I had open for a lazy Sunday. Thanks.

I thought it was also because of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D._B._Cooper and the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooper_vane.

Actually, newer 737's have emergency exits that swing open outwards. They are probably locked into position, but not by the pressure, so, I guess, it would not be that difficult to pop them open.

Most A320's I ride have the plug-type emergency exit that would be rather difficult to open mid-flight.

Also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-10#Cargo_d...

Sure. That's a remarkably lethal engineering mistake.

It is an interesting story, but now I wonder what the phrase "disarm doors" means that you often hear from the captain to the flight attendants after they've stopped at the airport.

When doors are "armed", opening them automatically deploys emergency exit slides.

And when they say "cross-check" it means that the attendant at one door should look across and see that the other door has been done correctly. It's a part of the check-list culture that pervades the aviation industry and is partly responsible for the continuing safety record.

http://www.upi.com/Top_News/2009/04/17/Man-jumps-from-plane-... "The Adlair Aviation's two pilots said the man became agitated aboard the King Air 200 turboprop plane Wednesday night, and both tried to calm him down. However, about 110 miles before landing, the man managed to pry open a door and jump out, the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. reported."

How do skydivers do it?

They don't jump out of commercial airliners.

Airliners didn't always have this door mechanism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D._B._Cooper

The plane isn't pressurized, and often, the cabin has no door at all -- you are free to step right out of the aircraft. The maximum altitude is kept below 12-15k ft -- above that, a jump would require special breathing equipment for the dive.

Some planes do have closing doors -- for instance, rear-loading cargo planes. Those are the most fun to jump out of, since you can take a running James Bond-style leap out the back of the airplane.

Free to step out of the aircraft, but typically you can clip yourself into the inside of the plane with a carabiner. My first time jumping out of a perfectly good plane was at 15,000 feet out of a plane with no "normal" door on the side: as we climbed to altitude, we were sitting on the floor of the plane looking towards the tail - and straight out the gaping door on the side of the plane. It's a weird thing to look (almost) directly ahead and see the ground at that angle.

Someday I'll jump out of a rear-loading plane -- as long as it's not a static line jump... since I'm not military, that probably won't be a problem though ;)

So what if you 'unlocked' the door at high altitude, when the plane goes downwards, as soon as pressure is low enough, it will open.

Obviously this wouldn't apply at low altitudes - i.e. it would be possible to open the door because the difference between internal and external pressures would be less. But then people wouldn't have to worry about being sucked out the door either.

What do you mean 'unlock' ?

The story plainly tells you that the whole door is designed in such a way that the door wont go anywhere unless the pressure on both sides is equalized.

You can unlock the door by turning the handle. You won't be able to get it open, but it's unlocked. So when the pressure stabilizes, the door can easily be opened.

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