Just saw this news piece today:
Have never heard of such a thing, and that includes explosive decompression incidents like Southwest Airlines 1380, in which an engine failure took out a window and caused a rapid cabin decompression event.
The news article made no mention of sudden loss of cabin pressure, but what else could have caused people to bleed from their nose and ears? And how sudden would the drop in pressure need to be in order to cause this sort of thing?
From the article:
Fellow passenger Jaci Purser said it felt like somebody was stabbing her in the ear. “I grabbed my ear, and I pulled my hand back, and there was blood on it,” Purser said.
Definitely prompt depressurization. Just a couple of psi of rapid ambient pressure change can be enough to cause barotrauma, particularly if you suffer from blockage of the eustachian tubes, and some people (especially those with hypoertension) may be more prone to nosebleeds.
I’ve never experienced rapid or explosive decompression, but I have seen scuba divers ascending way too fast suffer from bleeding from trauma to the middle ear, which is a precursor to decompression sickness; when you see that, you basically put the diver on oxygen and call for air evac to transport the diver to the nearest decompression chamber as soon as possible.
Stranger
There are also pressurization malfunctions that go the other way: uncontrolled pressure increase. Eventually a dumb spring loaded relief valve will be pushed open before the airplane bursts, but if the excursion starts from low altitude with little overpressure inside versus outside, the ride for your ears will be very painful and perhaps injurious before the emergency relief valve saves the day.
From your own experience with flying, do you find your ears bothering you during climb, or during descent? Which takes conscious effort to manage and which just happens naturally? For most people, climbing is easy. It’s the descent which triggers stuffy ears, pain & crying in little kids, and the need to manually “clear your ears”.
Climb is pressure decreasing. Descent is pressure increasing. Turn that knob up to eleventy and bloody ears from burst eardrums are to be expected.
I’ve only flown twice in my life (once on a commercial flight when I was about 7, the other time in a private plane being flown by a family friend), so can’t say much there. I do know that when I’m in the car and we’re going to/from significantly higher altitude (we live at sea level), I’ll experience ear pressure imbalance going either direction. It’s never been worse than yawning or intentional ear clearing will clear, but I do take a decongestant before leaving for such a trip, since my sinuses can get rather upset about the matter otherwise.
A cabin can depressurize very rapidly; you just need a big enough hole. OTOH, AIUI cabin pressurization is supplied by turbine bleed air and will have a limited flow rate. Assuming the worst case, how rapidly can cabin pressure be increased?
Fast enough to bust ears. One psi is a lot of delta pressure; 3 is huge. It only takes 5-10 seconds to build enough pressure to be painful. A few more seconds and some people are bleeding.
Normal pressurization control is about forcing a vast amount of air in there at well over ambient internal pressure, while simultaneously letting the same vast volume out at the other end. During climb or descent the control system sets up very small imbalances between the flows to slowly increment or decrement the pressure. If something goes wrong and instead of a small imbalance between inflow and outflow there’s a large imbalance the situation gets ugly quickly.
3 psi isn’t that bad. That’s 7 feet down in a swimming pool, a depth you can quickly hit when jumping from a good springy diving board.
But if the cabin is supposed to handle a pressure altitude of 8K feet while cruising at 40K feet, that’s an inside/outside pressure differential of about 8 psi - so yeah, if something screws up while flying at relatively low altitude (where inside/outside pressure differential should be close to zero), I can imagine the system might be able to rapidly increase cabin pressure by as much as 8 psi.
Many years ago while in the USAF, I needed to become qualified for flight in aircraft that would fly above the altitudes that normal commercial airliners occupy.
Part of the training was to sit in a pressure controlled “room” where the levels were about those normal for civilian air travel…about 8000 feet. No problem until the pressure was released and allowed to drop to something in the vicinity of 40,000 + feet. We were warned to open our mouths to allow for the air pressure to equalize easily through the mouth. You couldn’t participate if you had a cold or a condition that might affect the eustachian tubes. We then very quickly put on oxygen masks to eliminate passing out from oxygen loss due to the very low pressure.
Interesting experience.
I flew once with bronchitis. Take off was the single most painful experience of my life, up to that point. Landing was 10 times as worse. Would not recommend.
Shouldn’t that be a recompression chamber?
(I was actually just making a joke, but I looked it up and they are called recompression chambers. At least sometimes)
Tangential question: for those passengers who experienced bleeding from the ear, how severe or long-lasting is that injury? Permanent damage or will they have hearing loss?