Originally Posted by
Taddles
Just wondering how forceful a suck hole would that have been?
Still remembering the New Zealander sucked out over the Pacific when an improperly closed cargo door ripped some fuselage with it.
Originally Posted by
powerjets
Please calculate the lateral displacement as it passed the tailplane
There's somewhere around 450 cu mtrs of air that is going to go venting, the gap is initially a bit more than 0.2 sq mtrs. once the panel departs fully, there is a larger exit area, but the pressure is going to be far lower already. The area that had to open up to release the door is larger than needed to be considered an explosive decompression, so the pressure will equalise pretty quickly, most of the differential will be gone by the time the door was fully released. Thereafter, buffet will be the main airflow issue in the cabin.
The doors trajectory is going to have a complex solution, and that won't have a high probability of being correct. There will be a probabilistic solution giving likelihood of any given outcome, wild guess, the probability of impact with the tail is going to be somewhere around 5-6%, and then the probability of severe damage from that is going to be another complex solution, but it will be about 30-45% or somewhere near that. Worst case outcome is not good at all, and the pax have obviously had good clean living that was paying off, the chance of someone going skydiving (sadly not Putin) was pretty high. Debris impacts are not unknown and can range from expensive to catastrophic, remember what a chunk of foam can do to a space shuttle leading edge. When released, it's not going to go far out laterally from the fuselage, and it will slow down rapidly. The panel will be unstable initially which would tend to make it follow close to the upwash of flow to the airframe, so it is not going to be so far from the stabiliser, wild guess, still passing below it and at part span. Presume the forward lower hinge will fail first, but the dudes at NTSB will be interested in the stresses on those to get an idea of where it went. Overall, it is irrelevant, once departed it was not a desirable state, lots of opportunities for dragons to rear their heads. As a problem to solve, it is far more demanding than assessing the probable trajectory of a burst disk. Good luck working that out.