If you’ve ever flown before, you’re probably familiar with the awful feeling of your ears popping as your plane hurtles itself into the air. And you’ve probably heard stories of whack jobs trying to yank open emergency exits mid-flight in an attempt to really screw things up. Both of these scenarios boil down to cabin pressure, and while it may cause us some initial discomfort, if any of said whack jobs actually succeeded in opening doors at 30,000 feet (thanks to physics, they really can’t), a swift decline in cabin pressure could prove deadly.
That’s why what happened to these people aboard a flight from Seoul, Korea, is so terrifying. Someone made the horrific realization that one of the emergency exit doors was cracked…and they only noticed the issue after making it 10,000 feet into the air. Check it out.
(via Mirror)
While opening a door in the middle of a flight is nearly impossible because of pre-existing cabin pressure, if someone did manage to pop a door open at cruising altitude, the cabin would quickly depressurize, temperatures would plummet to frostbite-inducing levels, and the plane would likely break apart in the air.
Because the door was already open at the time of takeoff and the plane didn’t make it beyond 10,000 feet, pilots on this particular flight were able to turn back to the original airport and get everyone off of the craft safely. While on board, people reported experiencing massive headaches and feelings of intense nausea…but things could have been much worse.