Why do planes lost cabin pressure

Pilots then need to get the aircraft down to a safe altitude where everyone can breathe normally. Loss of pressure could be caused by a bomb and destroy the plane in the worst case scenario.

However, the vast majority of decompressions are not the explosive kind. In fact, cabin decompression is actually not nearly as bad as one might think - and crew are trained to handles such situations. A pilot told Express. Another pilot who spoke to Express. During normal ascent and descent, if you suck on a hardboiled sweet, take a drink or yawn, it can help open the Eustachian tube — which runs from your middle ear to the back of the nose — to allow the pressure in the inner ear to equalise with that outside the ear.

Doing these things causes the opening in the back of the nose to stretch, allowing the air pressures to equalise. The Ryanair incident resulted from a loss of cabin pressure.

This is where the mechanically maintained cabin air held at the pressure representing 5, feet-8, feet escapes to outside the aircraft where the pressure is much lower. This means that the air within the ear, which was also at a higher pressure 5, feet-8, feet , tries to escape.

This is because the cabin has now dropped to the lower pressure of the outside of the aircraft. At this point, the packet of crisps would also explode. Images on social media also showed blood-filled oxygen masks, probably the result of the rupture of small vessels in the roof of the nose as the change in pressure occurred. This was also likely the result of expanding liquids and gases that have to escape somewhere. While Ryanair claimed "a small number received medical attention as a precaution", a total of 33 passengers, some of who were bleeding from their ears and nose, had to be hospitalised.

Air is less dense at high altitudes than low altitudes. At ground level, the air pressure is a little over 14 pounds per square inch PSI. When an airplane reaches its typical cruising altitude — usually about 30, to 40, feet — the air pressure may be just 4 to 5 PSI.

The low air pressure associated with high-altitude flights can restrict passengers from receiving an adequate amount of oxygen unless the cabin is pressurized. Low air pressure means the air is less dense. Therefore, it contains less oxygen.

Airplanes need pressurized cabins because it ensures passengers, as well as crew members, receive an adequate amount of oxygen in the air they breathe. The good news is that modern-day airplanes are designed with redundancy measures in case of pressurization failure.

Passengers can place one of these oxygen masks over their face to obtain a sufficient amount of oxygen until the airplane descends and lands. Loss of pressurisation is a potentially serious emergency in an aircraft flying at the normal cruising altitude for most jet passenger aircraft.

Loss of cabin pressure, or depressurisation, is normally classified as explosive , rapid , or gradual based on the time interval over which cabin pressure is lost. The cabins of modern passenger aircraft are pressurised in order to create an environment which is physiologically suitable for humans Aircraft Pressurisation Systems.

Maintaining a pressure difference between the outside and the inside of the aircraft places stress on the structure of the aircraft.