Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/04/30/what-airplane-cabin-depressuri.html
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The ghosts can’t get you if you tell yourself it’s only fog.
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It was not “like walking through clouds, literally” it WAS walking through clouds, literally!
(Does nobody know how to use “literally” any more?)
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So many questions. Was this a simulation? On the ground? In the air? Why didn’t the oxygen masks pop out? If the cabin is depressurised, how did the camera person breath and talk? Were they wearing an oxygen mask?
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Looking at the YouTube comments, this was a pressurization test. The pressurized the cabin to 7psi on the ground to check for hull leaks. The fuse for the masks was pulled to prevent them from dropping so they wouldn’t have to pack them up again.
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Literally no one.
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Looks like somebody booked too late and got stuck in the smoking section circa the 20th century.
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Beware of the langoliers!
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Quickly, someone, jam Gert Fröbe in to the broken window! That’ll buy us some time to land this thing.
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Except maybe me, you and euansmith?
@agies You realise you just spoiled the fun that was about to take off in the other half of this thread?
We were taxiing along the runway of illiteracy ready to take off into the skies of grammatical pedantry when you grounded us. Boo. 
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Yea, but the Youtube comments also say that Killary Klinton killed Vince Foster.
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The scourge of pedantry lives in every thread.
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Well, not these comments specifically.
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As an asthmatic, this is doubly disconcerting. Fog is hard enough to breathe in, but ghost fog?
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So it is an open question how much this resembles an actual depressurization where the pressure is lower than sea level rather than just having been above sea level.
And here I always assumed that was an individual pressure sensor for each mask, not central. Because in some accidents the electrical power goes out.
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I’m probably over simplifying an over simplification.
In a former workplace that had liquid-helium-cooled superconducting magnets, I was told that if the superconductors failed and boiled off the helium, it would more or less instantly condense all the water vapor in the room, making it hard to find your way out of the asphyxiating environment, although that was probably just people being melodramatic. But this makes me want to see that would look like now.
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It would of course depend on the amount of helium, the rate at which it boiled, and the volume of the space it filled. But some of the boiling helium would combine with the air, which is quite opaque to the visible spectrum as astronomers well know.
Based on seeing similar magnets “quenched”, letting off a little helium to quickly cool them, I suspect their concerns might not be too over-dramatic.
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