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Old 1st Aug 2008, 06:27
  #843 (permalink)  
pacplyer
 
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No, but it was a modern car, which has to pass modern safety standards, made of steel, not thin aluminum alloy. I'm sure if you sealed it up properly, took care of the windows, it would be able to stand much higher pressure than a 747.
Certainly, Soupman,

Your rebuttal sounds fair. But may I point out, a flaw in that argument. A modern automobile in compliance with modern DOT highway safety standards is not designed to withstand pnematic expansion forces from within the vehicle. That's why it flew apart so dramatically. It is only designed (with any significant magnitude) to withstand the opposite: external compression and energy absorption from outside the vehicle (a crash.)

You guys are mixing apples and Oranges imho. The material chosen for design is not the only factor in strength. The Toyota in that picture (not some "Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang" sealed window pickup you've imagined) is incapable of being pressurized. Ergo, the damage we see in the photo is not representative of what would happen in a reverse stress-engineered structure like a 747 pressure containment hull.

This is why aeronautical engineering is quite a different thing altogether than engineering the stresses involved in a simple soup-can (even a four wheel drive one from Japan.)

Granted, I will concede that IF the cylinder itself goes off that close to the 747 skin and fuselage structure: we are going to loose some skin baby. Thank God for great aeronautics aloft in Boeing Aircraft (built like tanks.) They've repeatedly come home safe with huge portions of the aircraft gone.

Repeat after me everybody: "If it's not Boeing, I'm not Going."

Vortsa is dead-balls-on imho with his post, BTW. And agree with his preventative failure post below as well;

Aviation post-accident/incident investigation, however, does factor stats in for likelyhood, but does not rule out anything outside those stats. If the evidence leads off in a certain unlikely direction (like the DC-10 #2 eng uncontained N1 hub failure, or structural O2 cylinder failure) then the industry has changed and new AD's NPRM's etc result.

Last edited by pacplyer; 2nd Aug 2008 at 00:40. Reason: better sarcasm, quote, expanded response, clarification, etc
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