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The de Havilland Comet (involved in this event) also has a famously dark history as the first passenger jet. This status was short-lived when square windows po
by chasil 14d ago
The de Havilland Comet (involved in this event) also has a famously dark history as the first passenger jet.
This status was short-lived when square windows popped out of their frames at high altitude when the cabin was pressurized.
The line had a much longer service life hauling freight.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Havilland_Comet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Havilland_Comet
- maximilianburke 14d agoAlso as the Hawker Siddley (later BAe) Nimrod maritime surveillance aircraft.
- gavinsyancey 14d agoThat's enough of an oversimplification as to not really be true. They developed an issue with explosive decompressions, because at the time we didn't fully understand how cyclic stress caused metal fatigue. It is true that they had square-er windows than modern planes, but they knew that and added reinforcement. The stress concentrations inducing fatigue cracks were around square cutouts for an antenna, not the passenger windows. Also, the windows didn't pop out of their frames. Large portions of the fuselage ripped open. And they lived a longer service life after the fuselage was reinforced in the areas that cracks were starting, but had trouble overcoming their bad reputation from the earlier explosive decompressions. Source: the introduction to the Wikipedia article you linked. Read it.
- petreradu 14d agoAs Henry Cavill would say: “Wikipedia? You get your facts from Wikipedia?”
- gavinsyancey 13d agoNot the first place I'd heard that, but I found it ironic that the parent comment's own link refuted their claims in the first couple paragraphs. And Wikipedia tends to be pretty reliable -- in a 2005 Nature analysis, Wikipedia was found to have on average less errors per article than Encyclopedia Britannica: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Press_releases/Nature_compares_Wikipedia_and_Britannica https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Press_releases/Natur...
- tengwar2 14d agoAlso: every modern airliner has windows with corners in the cockpit.
- marsx-dev 14d ago[dead]