World War Z

What happens when you flip out on a Boeing 737 and try to open the door at 30,000 feet?

After dousing himself in bathroom water on his Southwest flight from Chicago to Sacramento, 23-year-old Joshua Carl Lee Suggs tried to find that out. When asked to take his seat, Suggs pushed past flight attendants and attempted to open the exit hatch because he "wanted to look out the window." A couple of good Samaritans wrestled the suicidal half-wit into submission.

Suggs is now safe in a Nebraska jail cell after the pilot emergency landed in Omaha to boot the addled hooligan. Since Suggs never got his question answered, we continued his search for enlightenment. So we asked the experts.

Pilot and Vietnam War veteran Pete Jordan knows exactly what happens when a pressurized cabin decompresses 30,000 feet in the air at 300 to 600 mph: "There's no oxygen, and it gets damn cold in a hurry." An open door would release the cabin's ball of pressure, causing an immediate "suction explosion."

Jordan's plane was shot during 'Nam. Although terrifying, small bullet holes at low speeds and altitude gave this veteran a very different chaos than what Suggs might have caused.

In 1988, Aloha Airlines Flight 243 lost a section of its fuselage roof at 24,000 feet due to metal fatigue. It was an 18-year-old Boeing 737. Explosive decompression removed and killed one un-harnessed flight attendant and injured 65 strapped-in passengers. There have been no other instances of similar roof removal since that tragedy.

Chief flight instructor at the US Aviation Academy David Cruz says there's a good reason that you never hear about the hatch opening.

"Commercial planes have been designed to prevent in-flight exits ever since [D.B. Cooper] robbed that flight in [1971]," says Cruz.

D.B. Cooper's famous sting operation was in a Boeing 727, which "had a stairwell that automatically lowered in the back." Cooper grabbed around $200,000 in cash and jumped (likely to his death) out of the rear of the plane. Modern commercial aircrafts do not allow passengers to voluntarily exit in flight no matter how badly they want to die.

Miles Kotay of Boeing's Aviation Safety Communications confirms it. "It's completely impossible to open the door of any modern Boeing in flight," he says. "The doors are locked, which doesn't even matter, because physics prevents it anyway."

Boeing's inwardly opening doors have around 1,000 lbs of suction holding them shut.

Sorry, Suggs. Looks like you'll just have to "look out of the window" by... looking out the window.

Originally published at Esquire.

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