How likely is it for a 787 Dreamliner to have it's wings snap or its chassis break apart during flight?

[Archinist]

Well, I was flying on a 787 today and was mostly terrified for the entire flight, having never flown in a aircraft before, ever and being normally jumpy in skyscrapers and high apartment buildings. I was sure that the plane was flying far too fast (1000 km/h according to computer from seat) at far too high and eventually some strong turbulence would rip it into pieces, but that didn't happen. Are flight speeds and heights accurate and if they are, are they normal for 787s? Also, how strong are 787s? Is it likely for them to break apart when in flight?

[Iroscato]

Extremely likely. You are a very lucky man to have survived a trip in such an infamous deathtrap.

[Tribble]

Extremely likely. You are a very lucky man to have survived a trip in such an infamous deathtrap.

Agreed, there is a good reason why the 787 is known as "the Flying Titanic."

[Ziggy Stardust]

All joking aside, the answer is "not very". The probability is diminishingly small. Since 2009, when 787s were first introduced, there has only been a single in-flight accident on a 787, and that was a problem involving its batteries that did not result in its wings snapping or its chassis breaking. That's one (minor) incident out of countless thousands of flight-hours.

I will say that if the in-flight computers really did say 1000 km/h, that's almost certainly inaccurate. Cruising speeds for large aircraft like that are more like 900, and I don't think most of them are capable of getting all the way to 1000. Similarly, their service ceiling is around 13,000m, though IIRC typical cruising altitudes are probably around half that.

There's a reason air travel is, statistically, the safest form of travel. The amount of engineering and regulations going into making sure they are safe is absolutely immense, and something you don't see as just a casual traveler because it happens behind the scenes (Broomstick can give you more info on this). Really, the only times big jets are brought down is due to some form of foul play; though there have been a handful of instances of some sort of mechanical failure or similar accident, they are usually a function of VERY specific and random circumstances that just happen to arise out of the millions of flight-hours being logged. I think China Airlines Flight 611 is the only case I can think of off the top of my head that actually involved a mid-air break-up due to metal fatigue, and even that was because proper maintenance procedures hadn't been followed.

[Lord Revan]

Unless the plane is so poorly maintained that it wouldn't cleared for flight by any sane officials, the chance of the airframe breaking in normal level flight due to stress is practically non-existant. plane airframes are rated so that unless the pilot goes into a suicide dive (basically turn the nose of the plane so that it points to the ground) it won't reach speeds high enough to reach the stress limits of the airframe.

[Simon_Jester]

Modern airplanes are very carefully designed by tremendous huge teams of very skilled people who use huge computers to simulate every detail of how they operate before they even start building one, and then extensively test the aircraft in real flight operations.

As long as they're being used the way they're designed to be used, they do not break apart in midair. Some electronic system might fail, but there are tons of backup systems for everything on the plane. The airframe itself is very safe, especially on a brand-new aircraft like a Boeing 787.

It's like asking, "I just bought a new car, what are the odds of the wheels randomly falling off in my first day of driving it?" The odds are, effectively, zero. Because the corporations that make cars don't allow that kind of sloppy, low-quality workmanship. They would go out of business if they did. Because nobody would buy their lousy cars if that happened. No one would do that, if it were common for the wheels to randomly fall off a new car from them.

...

I will also note that, Archinist, it is safer to be flying fast if you are also flying high in an airplane. At higher altitude, air is less dense, and there is less air resistance, so there is less drag force on the plane. Therefore any 'turbulence' you experience will be weaker due to the thin air. Also, the speed of sound is higher in thin air, so planes that are only designed to fly below the speed of sound (like airliners) can fly faster at higher altitudes and still be safe. 1000 kilometers an hour, for example, is well below the speed of sound and flying at that speed should not damage the frame of a modern aircraft

Also, this turbulence will be very obvious and cannot sneak up on you. Because turbulence feels like giants shaking the plane, and nobody would fail to notice their plane being shaken by giants.

[Starglider]

I will say that if the in-flight computers really did say 1000 km/h, that's almost certainly inaccurate. Cruising speeds for large aircraft like that are more like 900, and I don't think most of them are capable of getting all the way to 1000.

1000 km/h ground speed is fairly common, with a tailwind.

[Isolder74]

Note likely. The only time to worry is if you live in the world of The Far Side.

[Raw Shark]

Archinist, what the fuck are you smoking? And may I please hit that?

[muse]

[Simon_Jester]

Archinist, what the fuck are you smoking? And may I please hit that?

I don't know. It seems to cause paranoid delusions and some really weird hallucinogenic trips. You can probably find something better.

[Archinist]

Archinist, what the fuck are you smoking? And may I please hit that?

I don't know. It seems to cause paranoid delusions and some really weird hallucinogenic trips. You can probably find something better.

Odd how you've never said that on my other threads which were objectively 'stranger' than this one, which is quite normal.

Anyway, as I said I've never been in anything that goes in the air without a giant concrete base. Even in secure apartment blocks and skyscrapers I'm still a bit nervous, which is perfectly normal to be nervous of great heights. The plane was also very loud and there was a wind noise the entire time.

How safe is flying high in the air in general? Is it possible for the airplane to hit a stupidly thin pocket of air and the engines to become useless and cause the plane to freeze solid and plummet? Or what would happen if the plane went up too fast and could not slow down quickly enough? Could it a very lightweight airliner with powerful engines go up so far that it's air brakes became useless, causing it to keep rising until it completely left the atmosphere?

Similarly, their service ceiling is around 13,000m, though IIRC typical cruising altitudes are probably around half that.

Well, there was a window which could be make dark and light. I kept it dark so I couldn't see what was outside the plane most of the time, but I could still see that the clouds were extremely far below the aircraft and barely visible, and since clouds are very high above the ocean, it must have been flying very high.

There's a reason air travel is, statistically, the safest form of travel.

[/quote]

Is it actually safer than cars when compared to the hundreds of millions of cars people are using all the time, in comparison to probably only 1000 or so airplanes being used every few days?

[Iroscato]

A 5-second google tells me there are in fact over 100,000 flights per day.

[Iroscato]

Why do you think a plane crash usually makes the news? It's because plane crashes are newsworthy, since they are so rare.

[Jub]

Archinist, you're on the internet and can literally google this shit. Why not do that instead of wasting bandwidth here?

[General Zod]

I fly quite a bit. My main concern is whether I'm going to end up feeling nauseous from the turbulence rather than whether the frame is going to fall apart.

[J]

Would this be an appropriate place to post videos of airplane crashes?

[General Zod]

Go nuts.

[Joun_Lord]

I honestly don't get this worry. Sure some nervousness about flying if its your first time and some worry about height if that bothers you, but outlandish stuff like the wings falling off or air pockets seems ludicrous.

Airplanes even flying out of less the reputable services are ridiculously well built and designed from decades of flying experience with no doubt millions of flights. Everything that could possibly go wrong within reason has happened and been accounted for. Lightning strikes, sudden weather shifts, extreme cold, engines not shutting off, and even flying extremely high. All has happened before and all has been considered when designing modern aircraft.

The worry about an aircraft slipping the surly bonds of earth seems especially strange. I'm HIV positive that its impossible. We wouldn't be launching payloads with bigass rockets if any aircraft could break orbit. Even aerial launch of spacecraft require powerful rockets to break orbit and that as far as I know is extremely limited in size.

Short of something outlandish like invading Martian marauders or Darth Vader parking a Star Destroyer in an aircrafts path or something that cannot be really guarded against but is unlikely unless flying over an active warzone like a missile strike, very few things are going to knock a plane out of the sky.

There's something on the wing.....

[The Vortex Empire]

Is it actually safer than cars when compared to the hundreds of millions of cars people are using all the time, in comparison to probably only 1000 or so airplanes being used every few days?

Cars have a fatality rate of 7.3 deaths per billion passenger-miles traveled, a person who drives 30 miles every day for a year faces a fatality risk of about 1 in 12,500. Aircraft have a fatality rate of 0.07 deaths per billion passenger miles traveled, a person who took a 500-mile flight every single day for a year would have a fatality risk of 1 in 85,000. Flying is wildly safer than driving.

[Simon_Jester]

Given the kinds of posts Archinist makes, he does not know enough about the world to be able to do good Internet research. Learning things on the Internet may have made him the way he is today. If he's ASKING QUESTIONS about things like this, that is progress!

Archinist, what the fuck are you smoking? And may I please hit that?

I don't know. It seems to cause paranoid delusions and some really weird hallucinogenic trips. You can probably find something better.

Odd how you've never said that on my other threads which were objectively 'stranger' than this one, which is quite normal.

Raw Shark never asked what you were smoking before. If he had, I would have said the same thing then that I said now.

Raw Shark and I like to make jokes about these things, and it is mostly just leftover annoyance from all the really weird and foolish scenarios you posted.

However, aside from some problems you're having because you know very little about science... All things considered this is one of the most reasonable things you've ever posted. I hope that learning facts helps you overcome your fear of flying, especially since you live on a giant island and the whole rest of the world can only be reached from there by boats and planes.

Anyway, as I said I've never been in anything that goes in the air without a giant concrete base. Even in secure apartment blocks and skyscrapers I'm still a bit nervous, which is perfectly normal to be nervous of great heights. The plane was also very loud and there was a wind noise the entire time.

I can sympathize with you being afraid, but the fact remains, it's a very safe way to travel. Driving around in a car is much more dangerous.

It would certainly have been much more dangerous to take your journey that you took in a plane, in a car instead. Because then you would have to drive your car across an ocean, which is impossible.

How safe is flying high in the air in general? Is it possible for the airplane to hit a stupidly thin pocket of air and the engines to become useless and cause the plane to freeze solid and plummet? Or what would happen if the plane went up too fast and could not slow down quickly enough? Could it a very lightweight airliner with powerful engines go up so far that it's air brakes became useless, causing it to keep rising until it completely left the atmosphere?

There are no 'thin pockets' of air. The density of the air is the result of gravity acting on the atmosphere. Air is the same density at the same altitude everywhere in the world, except for slight differences caused by air temperature. And those are predictable if you have weather forecasts, so if they were going to present a problem for a pilot, they could just fly around or fly up and down to compensate for changing air density.

The plane does not have rocket engines and its ability to go up is a function of how much air it takes into its jet engines. The plane will lose the ability to keep gaining altitude long before it loses the ability to stay in the air. Also, the pilot would have to be insane and stupid (too stupid to pass flight school) and the copilot would too, and the autopilot would probably have to not work either. There is no way for a non-suicidal pilot to cause a plane to go up "too high" so that it can't come back down.

Also, passenger planes do not have "air brakes" to slow them back down. Their speed is determined by a balance between the force of their engines and the force of drag slowing them down. Drag does not magically disappear and the engines' thrust is predictable. The faster the plane goes, the greater the drag, so the plane cannot "go too fast" without drag slowing it back down again. Unless the pilot did something suicidally stupid that the controls would probably not even let him do, he could not cause the plane to "go too fast" and somehow crash or otherwise fail.

Well, there was a window which could be make dark and light. I kept it dark so I couldn't see what was outside the plane most of the time, but I could still see that the clouds were extremely far below the aircraft and barely visible, and since clouds are very high above the ocean, it must have been flying very high.

The clouds could be 'only' a few thousand meters above the ocean, which would look very high up to someone on the ground, and you could still be far above them, without even being as high up as the tops of the tallest mountains.

There's a reason air travel is, statistically, the safest form of travel.

Is it actually safer than cars when compared to the hundreds of millions of cars people are using all the time, in comparison to probably only 1000 or so airplanes being used every few days?

Ahem.

Do not assume you know the numbers of people who do a thing, or how often a thing happens, without looking it up. Now, read this:

http://www.iata.org/pressroom/pr/Pages/ ... 30-01.aspx

Over three billion plane tickets were purchased in 2013, eight million people flew in a plane each day. Since no one plane holds more than a few hundred people, this requires tens of thousands of planes carrying passengers. Jet planes are used much more than once every few days; they usually fly multiple flights every day, unless the flights are very long and they can only do one per day.

Now, read this:

http://www.iii.org/fact-statistic/mortality-risk
http://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/data ... Stats.aspx

This talks about probability of dying in accidents in the United States; the numbers may be a little different in your country (I believe you are Australian?) but they won't be VERY different. In 2013, Americans had a one in 8900 chance of dying in a motor vehicle accident, and a one in 760000 chance of dying in an aircraft accident. And many of those deaths were in small aircraft flown by individuals, NOT in commercial aircraft flown by professionals.

From the second link, we see that only 39 of the deaths happened in commercial passenger aircraft, which meant that in that year, the American risk of dying in a commercial plane accident was 39 out of about 300 million, or roughly one in 7.7 million.

Now, Americans buy six hundred million plane tickets a year, suggesting that the average American flies about twice a year. If Americans flew 180 times more often (literally every day), THEN the odds of dying in a commercial plane would STILL be much, much lower than the odds of dying in a car accident. Americans would have to fly almost a thousand times more often for the danger to cancel out.

So yes, even if you compensate for the fact that people fly very rarely and drive very often, airplanes are still safer ways to travel. And they're certainly safer ways to travel from A to B than driving would be- because if people drove in place of all the flying they do, they would be spending more time on the road and that would increase deaths from driving.

[Broomstick]

First of all -

Guys, don't be asshats when it comes to someone asking questions about reality. Yes, Archinist's questions are fairly basic but we know he has a certain level of ignorance about the world. Second, I have long maintained fear of flying is not entirely irrational – it is actually normal to fear things you don't understand that appear dangerous. Being way high off the ground when you don't understand how the airplane stays up in the air would fall into that category.

Archinist, I'm a licensed pilot. We have some other pilots on this forum, though they haven't dropped into this thread yet. Go ahead and ask your questions.

Well, I was flying on a 787 today and was mostly terrified for the entire flight, having never flown in a aircraft before, ever and being normally jumpy in skyscrapers and high apartment buildings. I was sure that the plane was flying far too fast (1000 km/h according to computer from seat) at far too high and eventually some strong turbulence would rip it into pieces, but that didn't happen. Are flight speeds and heights accurate and if they are, are they normal for 787s? Also, how strong are 787s? Is it likely for them to break apart when in flight?

Well, you didn't say how high you were flying, but 9,000-11,200 meters are considered typical cruising altitudes for commercial airliners. The B-787 can cruise up to 12,800 meters. It is physically capable for it to go even higher.

At those altitudes picking up a fast tailwind in the jet stream is very possible, and even planned for, in which case a ground speed of 1000 km/h is quite reasonable and safe. Even an airspeed of 1000 km/h is within the capability of commercial airliners. They don't usually do that because it's not fuel-efficient and would cost more per mile traveled and airliners try to keep costs down.

So yes, those are normal altitudes and speeds for B-787's.

There hasn't been an in-flight breakup due to turbulence in an airliner in many decades, even in severe turbulence. The fuselages and wings of commerical airliners are capable of supporting twice their own weight, and by that I mean twice their fully loaded weight including anything that might normally be inside them. They are capable of flying inverted (proven when a test pilot barrel-rolled a Boeing 707 back in the 1960's, half a century ago) not that anyone would do that delibrately with passengers on board. Modern airliners can endure without damage maneuvers that would cause you to permanetly damage your underwear.

Turbulence can scare you, even injure you if you aren't buckled in when it hits, but it won't hurt the airplane.

Unless the plane is so poorly maintained that it wouldn't cleared for flight by any sane officials, the chance of the airframe breaking in normal level flight due to stress is practically non-existant. plane airframes are rated so that unless the pilot goes into a suicide dive (basically turn the nose of the plane so that it points to the ground) it won't reach speeds high enough to reach the stress limits of the airframe.

Even then, the problem is usually a matter of running out of altitude and hitting the ground rather than overstressing the airplane due to speed alone. Modern swept-wing jet airliners can't reach the speed of sound in level flight with their own engine power but they can exceed Mach 1 in a dive and remain controllable – the problem is how fast you reach the ground at those speeds. Also, abrupt control inputs could damage the airplane at those speeds but you should never see anything like those speeds in normal flight.

The plane was also very loud and there was a wind noise the entire time.

That is actually perfectly normal for an airplane. They are loud.

Even with the engines no longer working the air passing by the airplane still generates significant noise. And before you panic at that statement – there was an instance of an airliner running out of fuel halfway across the Atlantic Ocean and it glided all the way to a safe landing. There are a number of instances of airliners losing power and landing with absolutely no serious injuries to anyone on board so even for something that extreme they are very safe. Several years ago there was an airplane that hit birds on take-off, lost all engine power, landed in the Hudson River in New York City and everyone survived and most were completely uninjured. Even in an emergency, between crew training and engineering modern airplanes are very safe compared to other modes of travel.

How safe is flying high in the air in general?

In general, when it comes to airplanes higher is better/safer.

Is it possible for the airplane to hit a stupidly thin pocket of air and the engines to become useless and cause the plane to freeze solid and plummet?

No.

Due to air currents, it is possible for an airplane to descend rapidly for a very brief period (which, admittedly, will probably feel longer than it actually is to you, being inexperienced) but there is no loss of control.

The airplane will not “freeze” in the sense you mean.

Or what would happen if the plane went up too fast and could not slow down quickly enough? Could it a very lightweight airliner with powerful engines go up so far that it's air brakes became useless, causing it to keep rising until it completely left the atmosphere?

Going upwards, you can always slow down.

No, airplanes can not leave the atmosphere. And while there are things called “air brakes” they don't work the way you probably think they do.

Well, there was a window which could be make dark and light. I kept it dark so I couldn't see what was outside the plane most of the time, but I could still see that the clouds were extremely far below the aircraft and barely visible, and since clouds are very high above the ocean, it must have been flying very high.

Yes. It is normal for airliners to fly far above the clouds. This keeps them out of the most typically troublesome weather.

Clouds can vary in height from 0 (we call that “ground fog”) up to 50,000 feet or around 15,250 meters. Airliners either fly above clouds, or, for clouds that rise higher than they can fly, they can go around them if it looks like they might be a problem.

Is it actually safer than cars when compared to the hundreds of millions of cars people are using all the time, in comparison to probably only 1000 or so airplanes being used every few days?

Yes.

And you grossly underestimate the number of airplanes in the skies. I believe someone else has already addressed that number.

Short of something outlandish like invading Martian marauders or Darth Vader parking a Star Destroyer in an aircrafts path or something that cannot be really guarded against but is unlikely unless flying over an active warzone like a missile strike, very few things are going to knock a plane out of the sky.

B-747's have, actually, survived missile strikes when flying in active war zones. Not always, but the point here is that it is possible for an airliner to survive that sort of damage so really, again, you shouldn't worry during normal flights. Avoid warzones whenever possible is a good rule anyhow.

[Tribble]

First of all -

Guys, don't be asshats when it comes to someone asking questions about reality. Yes, Archinist's questions are fairly basic but we know he has a certain level of ignorance about the world. Second, I have long maintained fear of flying is not entirely irrational – it is actually normal to fear things you don't understand that appear dangerous. Being way high off the ground when you don't understand how the airplane stays up in the air would fall into that category.

To be fair Broomstick, Archinist's previous post was about using his laptop as a heater and wondering why the components aren't working right... while still insisting that jackets make people colder when they put them on. Forgive some of us for thinking that Dumber Than Parrots is trolling, especially as he could have just as easily used google or wiki to find the answers he was looking for.

[Raw Shark]

Fun Fact: I'm completely terrified of flying, even though my actual job which I do every day is an order of magnitude more likely to kill me. It doesn't make any sense, but there it is.

[Lord Revan]

one thing to remember that in engineering there's this thing called a safety margin so when something is rated for x (where "x" repesents the amount of stress the peice can endure), it really means that piece can endure x*1.10 stress before it breaks on average and that extra 10% in the safety margin.