In this case: https://www.pprune.org/accidents-close-calls/672872-ryanair-...
“>Glad it turned out well.
>Wonder what the Ryanair social media team is going to do with this one
Ryanair introducing new additional charge to have a window.”
Points for the wife!
(from https://www.pprune.org/accidents-close-calls/672872-ryanair-...)
Look, the windows not supposed to fall off, for a start. These things are built to rigorous aeronautical engineering standards — cardboard’s out, cardboard derivatives, no cellotape, no string. So chance in a million, really.
And to be clear, the plane that the window fell off was flown to safety. So there’s nothing out there but birds, air, wind and clouds… and the window that fell off.
"debris from a dramatic engine failure caused damage to the aircraft's window"
That's high-velocity pieces of metal. Hard to prevent that from shattering a window if engine housing didn't catch it.
How much stronger, thicker & heavier you want to make those windows? Costing how much more fuel? To save how many lives per year?
I'd think airplane builders (note: not airlines!) are more qualified to make that calculation than armchair safety 'experts'.
Turboprops can't, of course, contain a propellor failure which is why they have a big slab of armour in line with the prop disk. So in that case, yes, safety wins over cost and weight.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwest_Airlines_Flight_1380
Seriously though, as an aviation geek, I always avoid those seats when given a choice.
edit: Well, I hope we are beyond boohoo LLM based info now. Here is Fable 5 High's explanation, and I loosely verified it. I post this to save many watts of energy due to others asking the same thing.
Simplified:
> I'd like to avoid seats in the rotor burst zone: the rows roughly in line with the plane of the engine's fan and turbine disks, plus a few rows fore and aft of that.
More details:
> The term you're looking for is the rotor burst zone — sometimes called the uncontained engine rotor failure (UERF) debris zone. That's the phrase an aerospace engineer or pilot would immediately recognize.
> Here's the physics behind it: the fan, compressor, and turbine disks in a jet engine spin at enormous speeds (turbine disks can exceed 10,000 RPM). If a disk or blade lets go and the containment case can't hold it, the fragments fly out tangentially — meaning they travel in the plane of rotation of that disk, perpendicular to the engine's axis. They don't spray forward or backward much; they carve out a relatively narrow band.
> FAA guidance (Advisory Circular 20-128A, which designers use to minimize hazards from these events) models the debris path as the plane of each rotor stage plus roughly ±15 degrees fore and aft of it. Since an engine has multiple rotor stages spread along its length, the combined hazard band along the fuselage is a few rows wide, centered roughly abeam the engines.
More discussion in: Airliners.net: https://www.airliners.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1510797&...
They believe the window was smashed by pieces of the jet's engine - although Ryanair has not commented on this.
E.g. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.stormtech....
Colloquially speaking, it sucks. It’s like saying vacuum cleaners technically blow. It might be true but everybody knows it as sucking.
Turns out plane accidents are expensive, and the reputation loss as well. Don't even need to lose the plane, just the plane being stuck on the ground is expensive (they are also one of the most timely airlines because of this). Really can not afford to have accidents!