A window breaks during a flight: what happens in the cabin and who risks the most on board
The possibility that a window might break during flight is very remote. There has been only one aircraft model in history [...]
Southwest Airlines
Alaska Airlines
Oneworld
The possibility of a window breaking during flight is most remote. There has been only one aircraft model in the history of commercial aviation that was chronically affected by that type of accident: the British Comet, the first passenger jet in history. Its windows cracked and broke due to its square shape with angled corners. Introduced a more rounded shape of the portholes, the accidents ceased.
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(Photo Lars Söderström CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org)
However, it may happen that a window breaks because it is hit by a foreign body, such as a piece of fuselage. Or that to come off is a tailgate, as recently happened on an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 MAX.
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In that case, only the fact that the aircraft was still at a relatively low altitude and that the passengers and crew all still had their seatbelts fastened prevented a massacre. Because the gash that opened, if it occurred at high altitude, could have compromised the structure of the aircraft, as a result of what would have been a much more violent sudden depressurization than occurred, and anything that was not 'anchored' would have flown out of the plane, including passengers and flight attendants.
But even the breaking of a 'small' window can result in deadly consequences: April 17, 2018 Southwest Airlines Flight 1380, operated by a Boeing 737-700, was climbing above an altitude of 9,000 meters in the early stages of a flight between New York La Guardia and Dallas, when thehe window next to seat 14A was hit by one of the turbine blades of the plane's left engine, which had suffered what is referred to in the jargon as an 'uncontained engine failure, with whole chunks of the reactor coming off.
43-year-old Jennifer Riordan, who was sitting right next to the shattered window, she was partly sucked outside the aircraft, sustaining injuries that proved fatal. The pilots managed, a few minutes later, to bring the Boeing 737 back to the ground without further consequences, with an emergency landing at the Philadelphia airport.
From the first officer of a major European low-cost airline The Flight Club was told about What are the procedures followed in the cockpit in the event of a window failure. "In the cockpit we cannot know whether a window has broken and a door has blown off. That can only be communicated to us by the flight attendants, if of course they are in a condition to do so, although we might hear a 'bang' ourselves in the case of a window or a door blowing off. What we have is an indicator that tells us that in the passenger cabin the pressure is varying, and if the depressurization is very fast we perform what is called an emergency descent.".
In this situation, "the first step involves. the two pilots wear oxygen masks, confirming each other's operation. Then we put on the headphones and verify that we can speak and hear each other through the masks. So, the pilot who was at the controls starts emergency descent, which is performed at maximum speed and rate per minute if cabin depressurization is slow, but is instead performed without accelerating aircraft speed in the case of explosive depressurization. This is done because the violent depressurization may have caused damage to the structure or parts of the plane, which may not be able to withstand high stresses."
The rapid emergency descent rate is 7,000 feet (2,100 meters) per minute (basically a half dive) to an altitude of 10,000 feet, where the air becomes breathable again and outside temperatures more bearable. "At that altitude," the pilot continues, "one of the two pilots removes his mask, assesses whether he can breathe, and if so, the other removes it as well. The plane then proceeds to the nearest airport to perform an emergency landing, with a descent rate of 1,000 feet per minute.