Originally Posted by
DaveReidUK
In a more likely scenario, does anyone have ballpark figures for the likely cabin pressure decay vs time resulting from, say, a window blowout, assuming that all the packs are still running and (by then) the outflow valve has closed ?
First of all, I do not have an answer to your question. But I'd say it is very dependant on the aircraft type and the damaged that occurs. Pressure decay is also dependant on the volume of the aircraft vs the size of the hole on it. Then you'll add the air conditioning, outflow valve position etc to the equation. I would imagine that situation gets very bad much quicker in a F16 than in an A380.
[QUOTE=Radgirl;10613667]
MaŽam, I am very hesitant to say that there would be fatalities due to hypoxia even when starting the emergency descent from high levels. If we stick to "high level", the National Airlines 27 encountered an uncontained engine failure at 39000ft with hull breach and one passenger sucked out. All but that one survived. With the Aloha 243 incident there isn't much to debate: the pressure was gone that instant (at 24000ft), yet all but one survived. With the Southwest 1380 the depressurization at 32000ft was described as "rapid", yet again all but one survived. The fatalities obviously weren't due to hypoxia.
In all these cases the cause of death was anything but hypoxia. I would say that there are far more serious consequences with hull breach than risk of hypoxia, if the plane is brought down below 10000ft as soon as possible.