Can Doors be Opened in Flight?
One concern among nervous fliers is whether or not a door can be opened in flight. The fact is that they cannot. Ok, what about those planes that skydivers jump from? Those aircraft are unpressurized and are not flying at the altitude of a jetliner (35000-40000 feet). They fly around 10000 feet where there is still sufficient atmospheric pressure to allow humans to breath unassisted. Modern commercial aircraft are pressurized to allow us to remain comfortable inside the cabin at 40000 feet. The pressurized air for the cabin comes from the compressed air in the engines. This air is tapped off the engines with Bleed Valves and used to run different pneumatic systems on the aircraft as well as pressurizing the cabin for passenger comfort. That being said, the doors on commercial aircraft are of the “plug type” meaning that when the door is closed the structure of the door is actually larger than the “hole” it is covering and therefore the pressure inside the cabin, which is about 8 pounds per square inch, is actually pushing the doors against the aircraft structure that surrounds the door (the door frame) which would make it virtually impossible for anyone to open the door in flight. If you consider the surface area of the inside of the door and multiply that by 8 pounds per square inch, we are talking about 500 pounds of pressure keeping that door closed! No person I know can overcome that pressure! In short, you could lift the “OPEN” handle on the door but the pressure inside the cabin will keep it safely closed.
