What would happen if a gun was fired in an airplane during its flight?

Question

Would the pressure of being so high and going so fast affect it?

Answer 1

no.. it would just get a leak
even if it blew a window out the decompression is not that much...nothing like you see on TV

Answer 2

Not like in the movies. Airplanes are not a perfect pressurized tin cans. The engines work to keep the cabin at the equivalent of about 8,000 feet.

The average commercial airliners has the equivalent of a basketball sized whole in it, if you count all the cracks and crevices. The plane is designed with this issue in mind.

A bullet through the fuselage would cause some decompression, depending on where it was shot. A window would be worse than through the skin. More surface area would be blown out.

Allot of it also depends on the altitude. I shot a 40,000 feet would be worse than one at 10,000 feet.

I am hoping this is for general knowledge and your not working for Bin Laden.

Answer 3

There are already holes in the pressure vessel (both smaller and bigger than a bullet hole) for ventilation and pressurization control. The pressurization valve is as big as a hard cover novel on a 737 and could easily maintain the proper cabin pressure.

The skin is designed to a fail-safe standard so it will not tear with a hole in it.

As for the bullet itself it would go slightly faster (because of the thinner air in the cabin compared to sea level) but the aircraft's speed wouldn't affect it at all.

Answer 4

The lower air pressure may allow the bullet to travel faster than it would (say after 5 seconds) when other bullets are more affected by more air at a lower altitude...

To simplify, the rate of deceleration, assuming calm wind and fired from a still position in both cases, the bullet fired closer to sea level would slow down faster simply because there is more air down there...

Answer 5

For the most part...nothing much....
Most cabins are pressurized to about 8'000ft. This is about 10-11psi. (Normal atmospheric is 14.7psi / 29.92"Hg /1013mb)
At a normal cruising altitude of around 37,000ft the outside airpressure is about 3-4Psi / 250mb)
Therefore the pressure differential is about 6-8 psi..dependent mainly on cruising altiude.
This means that on every square inch of sheetmetal...there is about 6-8lbs pushing outwards....
If a bullet passes through this barrier...there would be a jet of air streaming out thru the hole..but thats about it....most people in the cabin would hardly notice other than the noise of the outrushing air..
Now should the bullet pass through a window....that could be quite different. The entire window loses its structural integrity and could fail. There would be far greater outrush of air. Anyone caught beside that window could be severly injured or worse.

Answer 6

I dont think youre talking about an explosive decompression.

If you take an ordinary gun and fire it at 40,000ft it would behave the same as at sea level. The speed dosenot affect it. The bullet will do the speed at the muzzle + the aircraft's total air speed.

Answer 7

It depends upon the aircraft and where the bullet hit. If it hits critical structures, weaknesses could result. However, as soon as a gun is fired, the pilot would probably slow down and start descending before any real damage occurred.

Answer 8

It all depends on where the bullet hits. If it punctures the cabin, the sudden decompression may blow out a even larger hole.
But the speed doesn't affect it

Answer 9

Experiements were done on Mythbusters.

Check it out. They do some really neat stuff. Eventually they do blow up the plane, but a simple gun shot didn't do much to the plane's structural integrity. So what you see in the movies is a myth.

Answer 10

there would be no problem but slow decompression, the oxygen masks would go down, and the pilots would dive for a safe altitude