Originally Posted by
Wageslave
It seems that there are people here who appear not to know or understand what "explosive decompression" is. There bizarrely seems to be a view that it somehow is or results in an explosion or forced dynamic disintegration of the airframe. Quite how this sort of misunderstanding comes about is a bit of a puzzle.
Explosive decompression merely refers to the speed of a decompression. A small-ish hole like this one would not result in explosive decompression, the air would exit over a period of a second or few with a woosh. If a door blew out it might be all but instantaneous and thus deemed "explosive". This has no effect in itself on the airframe - the damage that caused it is the dangerous event.
Of course it is arguable that delta 8psi in the cruise might momentarily exacerbate the bomb damage while it exhausts but it would be tiny compared to the effects of slipstream.
Explosive decompression that results in differential pressure in places not designed to take it (one or two events have distorted the cabin floor resulting in jammed controls, for instance) can cause horrendous problems, but is still nothing to do with an explosion!
I'm chuckling at a mental picture of cabin crew coolly assessing the weight of each pax and directing them to particular zones while feeding the figures back to someone in the galley who is carefully preparing a dropline load-sheet and correcting errant pax positions. Still, it could have happened, I suppose. Probably weren't enough pax on board to have had much effect this time but it's a consideration for the future if everyone flees an event to one end of the aircraft.
I daresay it was more a case of "those at the front cried forward, and those at the rear cried back!"
(with apologies to McCaulay.)
btw, I'm not saying the cc didn't do a good job of keeping cool, I'm not sure we know or whether it affected the outcome.
I disagree with you here. Firstly, the size of the hole and its instantaneous creation would have lead to an explosive decompression by any measure. Second, the reports of "smoke" throughout the cabin and flight deck indicate fogging from the pressure drop; yes,smoke from the explosive is also likely in part of the cabin, but not in the flight deck. A depressurisation fast enough to cause fogging is certainly enough to qualify as explosive. Explosive decompression does not mean that the whole airframe explodes.