Uncontrolled Decompression - Implications For Aircraft Design

Implications For Aircraft Design

Modern aircraft are specifically designed with longitudinal and circumferential reinforcing ribs in order to prevent localised damage from tearing the whole fuselage open during a decompression incident. However, decompression events have nevertheless proved fatal for aircraft in other ways. In 1974, explosive decompression onboard Turkish Airlines Flight 981 caused the floor to collapse, severing vital flight control cables in the process. The FAA issued an Airworthiness Directive the following year requiring manufacturers of wide-body aircraft to strengthen floors so that they could withstand the effects of in-flight decompression caused by an opening of up to 20 square feet (1.9 m2) in the lower deck cargo compartment. Manufacturers were able to comply with the Directive either by strengthening the floors and/or installing relief vents called "dado panels" between the passenger cabin and the cargo compartment.

Cabin doors are designed to make it almost impossible to lose pressurization through opening a cabin door in flight, either accidentally or intentionally. The plug door design ensures that when the pressure inside the cabin exceeds the pressure outside the doors are forced shut and will not open until the pressure is equalised. Cabin doors, including the emergency exits, but not all cargo doors, open inwards, or must first be pulled inwards and then rotated before they can be pushed out through the door frame because at least one dimension of the door is larger than the door frame.

Prior to 1996, approximately 6,000 large commercial transport airplanes were type certificated to fly up to 45,000 feet, without being required to meet special conditions related to flight at high altitude. In 1996, the FAA adopted Amendment 25-87, which imposed additional high-altitude cabin-pressure specifications, for new designs of aircraft types. For aircraft certificated to operate above 25,000 feet (FL 250), it "must be designed so that occupants will not be exposed to cabin pressure altitudes in excess of 15,000 feet after any probable failure condition in the pressurization system." In the event of a decompression which results from "any failure condition not shown to be extremely improbable," the aircraft must be designed so that occupants will not be exposed to a cabin altitude exceeding 25,000 feet for more than 2 minutes, nor exceeding an altitude of 40,000 feet at any time. In practice, that new FAR amendment imposes an operational ceiling of 40,000 feet on the majority of newly designed commercial aircraft.

In 2004, Airbus successfully petitioned the FAA to allow cabin pressure of the A380 to reach 43,000 feet in the event of a decompression incident, and to exceed 40,000 feet for one minute. This special exemption allows that new aircraft to operate at a higher altitude than other newly-designed civilian aircraft, which have not yet been granted a similar exemption.