Coldheart Tucker - 11 October 2012 08:46 AM

I don’t know, but it was a small hole that rapidly grew larger that nearly brought down the Aloha flight.  Even if the hole was quickly plugged, the panic and chaos inside the passenger cabin would be unnerving, the subsequent media hyping of the event would be almost as bad.

There was more to the Aoha flight 243 than just a tiny hole.  And according to this bullet holes won’t cause explosive decompression.  And how would media hype be an issue?  Sure it’s prevalent and annoying and some people will freak, but it’s not like people would riot in their planes.

EDIT
Additions.

Dead Monky - 11 October 2012 08:57 AM

Coldheart Tucker - 11 October 2012 08:46 AM

I don’t know, but it was a small hole that rapidly grew larger that nearly brought down the Aloha flight.  Even if the hole was quickly plugged, the panic and chaos inside the passenger cabin would be unnerving, the subsequent media hyping of the event would be almost as bad.

There was more to the Aoha flight 243 than just a tiny hole.  And according to this bullet holes won’t cause explosive decompression.  And how would media hype be an issue?  Sure it’s prevalent and annoying and some people will freak, but it’s not like people would riot in their planes.

EDIT
Additions.

There is debate about what all happened inside the cabin of the Aloha flight, with some speculation that a condition similar to water hammer in a boiler being to blame.

Inside the plane where the gun was fired, there absolutely would be panic.  Media hype would drive politicians to add “enhanced” screening techniques to the TSA “security ” measures currently being used.  Little of which would do any good at stopping people from smuggling weapons on a plane if they really wanted to.

First, the recently retired manager of the Douglas Long Beach Inorganic Chemistry section and his wife were sitting in first class where the damage occurred.  There were two attendants close by, and both were yanked up by the rushing air.  He grabbed the legs of one of them (since he had his seat belt on) and held her until the pressure stablilzed or there would have been two fatalities.  The engineers at Douglas were part of the industry team that examined the failure.  They found a number of small fatigue cracks on other similar Boeing aircraft in the same area.  Apparently the design allowed a tiny weakness.  All the remaining aircraft in service were retrofitted with an additional sheet of aluminum (a doubler) to handle the stress.

By the way, this failure was quite similar to the five Lockheed Constellations that went down in the early 1960s.

Even a 1/8th inch hole in the skin of a passenger aircraft will overpower the compressor and the aircraft will reach equilibrium with the outside quickly.  If the bullet penetrated a simple skin area the main problem would be the whistling that would contribute to driving the passengers to panic while the aircraft dove to lower than 8,000 feet.  However, if the bullet happened to hit in a high stress area, I can easily imagine the aluminum starting to tear, and once that happened the tear would continue so that anythng not tied down and close by would be sucked out.

Occam

I’d think the “bang” from the gun would put the passengers into a panic more than the whistling noise.  IIRC, a jetliner at low altitude burns more fuel than it does at 30K feet.  Over land, this isn’t much of an issue, on a long distance transoceanic flight, this might be a problem.