Most of us take human flight for granted. We board a plane in one city, get off in another, and rarely think about the scientific laws and incredible technology that make the in-between possible. Flying through turbulence, or experiencing a bumpy landing is like getting caught off-guard by a pop quiz you didn't study for. Unfortunately, all you have to go off of are some vague statistics you heard about flight being the safest way to travel and terrifying plane crashes you see in movies and on the news. It turns out, there are a handful of pretty crucial things we've gotten just completely wrong about how people fly and get killed while doing so.

5 Any Hole in an Aircraft Will Eventually Tear Open the Plane

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You Think:

Whether caused by gunfight or a violent bit of turbulence, a hole in the side of a plane will continue to grow and suck people out into the sky until it's closed or the plane has disintegrated. It's so reliable that in Iron Man 3, the bad guy says "Go Fish" before he blows off a plane's door because he knows the resulting hole is about to suck every person and chair out into the cold sunlight like it opened under the house in Poltergeist.

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In Goldfinger, Bond shoots out a small plane window and holds tight while the villain is sucked out from clear across the room.

The hole in the side of the plane from Passenger 57 spends 2 minutes acting as a massive wind tunnel, before it sucks the plane's door clean off, leaving a bigger hole and an even suckier wind tunnel.

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This is, of course, why airlines are so insistent that you wear a seatbelt and refrain from gunplay, even after the plane has reached a safe cruising altitude.

The Truth:

In 2011, a 5-square-foot hole (the size of most windows in your house assuming you don't live on a cruise ship) opened in the roof of a Southwest Airlines flight. It was cruising at 37,000 feet, meaning the pressure inside and outside of the plane were at what scientists refer to as peak explodiness. But when the explosive decompression occurred, the hole didn't suck anyone out, nor did it grow in size and ferocity as time went on. And it wasn't the first time such a dramatic action movie spectacle has failed to develop. That's just not how holes in airplanes behave.