Could you elaborate? I’m definitely not a chemist, but what I remember of the noble gases (including Helium) is that it’s extraordinarily difficult to get them to combine with anything.
So then I thought about fusion, which would certainly be difficult to see through. But I’m pretty sure I remember a statement that all the lithium in the universe was formed immediately after the big bang, which implies that hydrogen and helium do not (readily?) fuse.
And then… How much hydrogen is in the atmosphere? Very, very little - it has a tendency to combine with the oxygen very easily. Unless you somehow dissociate the water vapor. But there really isn’t much of that either.
I don’t know how this video was done but when Mythbusters was investigating the took a plane (junk) and ran the pressure up on the ground. Perfectly safe to walk around in until the final round when they used a small explosive. (Note: While their bomb punched a hole it didn’t do all that much to the plane. In flight is another matter–the bomb doesn’t bring the plane down, it rips it and the wind does the real damage.)
It wouldn’t have to be on the same circuit as the main power, it could be completely independent.
I think having 300 individual sensors would increase the chances (by 300x) of individual sensors being faulty and not tripping. I’m not sure the best thing to happen in a depressurization scenario is row 32 breaking out into a fight over who gets to use the one dangling mask…
(Of course, the chance of the one sensor not being triggered is 300x lower, but results in all 300 people dying, so over the long run the same number of people are expected to die.)
Probably a few extra die in the fights when only one fails, to say nothing of the bad publicity when the video of the row 32 mask brawl gets posted to youtube.
The question is which is more reliable, 300 individual sensors or 300 individual actuators? And I really don’t have a handle on the answer. I always assumed that the doors were simply designed to not latch tightly very tightly and only let air out slowly so that a sudden drop in cabin pressure would allow the internal pressure to force them open. That would seem the simplest solution.
There have been many sudden depressurizations that didn’t result in total loss, probably depends entirely where the failure occurs and if the wind can do the rest.
Alternatively, I think the bomb on Pan Am flight 103 blew the entire cockpit off of the plane, no wind damage necessary.
2/10. It strikes the right notes of condescension for word choice.
However, the image he gave was not of Pan Am 103, and was not attempting to illustrate that, but rather the previously mentioned case of wind removing fuselage. Pan Am 103 did have the cockpit (or “nosecone”) separate from the rest of the plane.
