The question came up today. “If the window in an airplane was broken, would everything be sucked out, including passengers?”
Here’s the story from
www.kfgo.com
about an explosion aboard a flight today.
Southwest Airlines
(Reuters) – A Dallas-bound Southwest Airlines Co made an emergency landing at Philadelphia International Airport on Tuesday after suffering engine trouble during the flight, local media reports said.
Television images showed visible damage to the plane’s exterior, and a man who said he had been a passenger on the aircraft told CNN he heard a loud bang during the journey and saw damage to the engine. One person was injured, media reports said.
Flight 1380, a Boeing Co 737-300, was bound for Dallas Love Field in Texas from New York’s LaGuardia airport with 143 passengers and five crew on board, Southwest said in a statement. The airline did not immediately confirm engine damage.
“All of a sudden, we heard this loud bang, rattling, it felt like one of the engines went out. The oxygen masks dropped,” the passenger, Kristopher Johnson told CNN. “It just shredded the left-side engine completely … it was scary.”
A spokesman for the Federal Aviation Administration declined to comment.
An
NBC TV station’s website
had this headline:
Woman Partially Sucked Out of Jet When Window Breaks Mid-Flight; Plane Lands Safely in Philadelphia
Further down in their story:
Relaying information from his daughter-in-law who was on the flight, Todd Baur told NBC10 the woman was partially “drawn out” of the plane before being “pulled back in by other passengers.”
There’s no doubting that something terrifying happened to those passengers. One person was killed. But, no one was sucked out.
I found an old “Mythbusters” episode in which they destroyed an airplane trying to bust the myth that anyone or everything would be sucked out if the window of an airplane was broken.
What do you think? If the passengers hadn’t helped would she have been sucked out?
I hope I never find out.
(Jack Sunday is a radio veteran with nearly 50-years “behind the mike.” He hosts “The Drive,” 4-7pm, weekdays on KFGO. He likes to say he’s not old…just aging.)
