re: Cockpit doors will open upon decompression...

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The emergency doors open to the inside of the cabin, 1/4 of sea level is about 3.6PSI, the emergency door is about 28 x 60 inches, making the force on the door 6048PSI or a little over 3 tons, nobody is going to open the door with the cabin pressurized.

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EDIT: Just reread and saw where you said it opens to the inside. Your point is legitimate, but your math is off.


Judging from your post, I don't think you have any grasp of how pressure or physics works.

EDIT: I semi-retract the above statement.


The inside of the plane is pressurized (so all of the force on the door is pushing outside to the area of low pressure). Fortunately, it's sealed in place by locking mechanisms. If a person were to disengage the locking mechanism the pressure differential would take over and push the door outside (so the 6048 lbs of force (not psi) exerted by the atmosphere on the door wouldn't stop the 14.7 psi (or with your measurements 24,696 lbs) pushing from the inside with the only possible thing holding it back being if the door is bigger on the inside and seated, which seems like a probable design feature to prevent an idiot from killing a bunch of people, but you're still depending on a thin piece of metal to hold back over 18,000 lbs...)

Furthermore, the pressure at altitude would be less than your conjecture based on Bernoulli's principle in which a moving fluid is at a lower pressure than the same fluid moving slower (it's the whole reason airplanes can fly in the first place). So the pressure gradient from inside to outside would be a bit more than what I said.


Sorry for rambling, but I'm bored and slightly inebriated.

the pressure is on the inside

I am glad y'all cleared this up. I have been flying every other week for work, and I have wondered if some crazy person could just decide to try and open the door. Good to know it's impossible.

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This is a Mytbusters episode covering explosive decompression of a aircraft.

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there is a door in the E&E compartment on the 777 that opens and closes in flight for various reasons, we were ferrying a plane from Europe to the US one day and I decided to go exploring, it's a whole different world down there, I was coming back from the rear of the belly to go back upstairs and the door partially opened, scared the shite out of me didn't get sucked out(in it's fully opened position there's room to jump out,) got a good look at some icebergs

So, if the pilot decides to lock us out, we're all just hosed? I expected better from the super alphas of the OT.

There have been air disasters involving the sudden opening of exit doors as well as parts of the fuselage.