Ah the joys of flying

[BurnItDwn]

1) On my last trip I watched Kingsman Secret Service (2 hour movie) and all 3 hobbit movies, and I still had time for a 1 hour documentary + change.

2) On A380's you got top camera, front camera, down camera

Well, if the office ever sends me to Chennai or Kolkata, (min of about 20 hours with 1 connection west coast continental US) I'll be sure to bring a decent laptop or tablet to play with on the plane... Otherwise, the only way I'll be on a 14+ hour flight for vacation in Asia or Australia. I do some day wish to visit, but I much more want to visit Norway, and to some extent, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and Iceland. And thats closer to a 12 hour flight from Chicago.

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

Lately, I've been flying my week's worth of clothes in a single backpack and stowing it under the seat in front of me. Since airlines have started charging to check bags, the overheads always get filled up. I've actually been on flights that couldn't board because there wasn't enough room in the overhead bins for everyone's crap. They ended up checking bags for free....and I skipped that line because I wasn't using the overhead bins.

I frequently check bags for free at the gate, and the staff are grateful
Just got to make sure to pack non-breakables/perishables/valuables in that larger piece ahead of time

 

[Jeff7]

Yea, The only pleasure left on flights is looking out the windows, but soon they will find a way to charge for that too!

It would simplify the design of the thing to do away with the windows. If I was designing a pressure vessel and someone from Marketing came up and told me to put a hole lot of little holes all over the thing so that you could see all the purdy stuff on the inside, I'd feel compelled to shove that person into a sturdy pressure vessel and fill it with concrete.

A pressure vessel is an energy storage device. A bomb is also an energy storage device. Bad things happen when such a vessel fails catastrophically. It's usually worse if it happens 35,000ft in the air.

Replace windows with screens. Screens weigh something, but that might be offset by a simpler window-free fuselage design.




....I'm guessing that that wasn't the intention of your post though.

 

[ImpulsE69]

It would simplify the design of the thing to do away with the windows. If I was designing a pressure vessel and someone from Marketing came up and told me to put a hole lot of little holes all over the thing so that you could see all the purdy stuff on the inside, I'd feel compelled to shove that person into a sturdy pressure vessel and fill it with concrete.

A pressure vessel is an energy storage device. A bomb is also an energy storage device. Bad things happen when such a vessel fails catastrophically. It's usually worse if it happens 35,000ft in the air.

Replace windows with screens. Screens weigh something, but that might be offset by a simpler window-free fuselage design.




....I'm guessing that that wasn't the intention of your post though.

Speaking of which. What is the little metal peg that is at the bottom of all the windows for?

 

[Ruptga]

I'm coming up with 8.3psi in a cabin pressurized to 7000ft that's flying at 38000ft. That's not trivial, but it doesn't seem fair to compare that with a bomb.

 

[Jeff7]

I'm coming up with 8.3psi in a cabin pressurized to 7000ft that's flying at 38000ft. That's not trivial, but it doesn't seem fair to compare that with a bomb.

8.3psi over a lot of square inches adds up to a lot of force, enough to lead to the destruction of one of the early pressurized-cabin jets. The roughly-square windows resulted in a concentration of stress at the corners. That, combined with the constant cyclical stress of pressurizing and depressurizing, was enough to lead to a few in-flight break-ups.

Embraer ERJ-145, a nice regional jet:
90" internal diameter, and let's go with 600" long, and assume it's a cylinder, and ignore the endcaps because I'm lazy.
169,646 square inches
>1,408,062 pounds of force trying to push that tube apart.


Yes, it's distributed across the inside area, but you still need to be careful of it, especially when one big design goal is "Make it as light as you possibly can," which translates to "Make the walls as thin as you can," which translates to "Higher stress." Keep in mind, the yield strength of cheap steel might be around 30,000psi, but you can still exceed that stress with your bare hands: Bend a paperclip. If there's not a lot of square inches available, it doesn't take much force to generate a very large stress.

Then add in "Let's cut a bunch of holes in it," and "It has to move through the air at 500mph."

Too many conflicting design goals can turn good engineers into sociopaths.

 

[K1052]

I blame the TSA for opting in old folks/leisure travelers/passengers with 12 kids in tow into Pre thereby gumming the whole works up. I actually step in front of people now who are clogging up the X-ray line taking their shoes/belt off and laptops out, sure I get a few dirty looks (particularly from the women) I don't give a shit anymore. This is the line for people who know what they're doing.