Mitt Romney made some aeronautical engineering observations Saturday while speaking about Friday's emergency landing of a plane on which his wife was a passenger. He wondered why aircraft windows don't open, saying, "It’s a real problem."
According to the Gawker, the plane on which Ann Romney was flying had to make an emergency landing Friday en route to Santa Monica, after an electrical fire caused the cabin to fill with smoke. According to LA Times, the emergency resulted from an electrical malfunction.
Romney remarked to LA Times at a Beverly Hills fundraiser Saturday night:
"I appreciate the fact that she is on the ground, safe and sound. And I don’t think she knows just how worried some of us were. When you have a fire in an aircraft, there’s no place to go, exactly, there’s no — and you can’t find any oxygen from outside the aircraft to get in the aircraft, because the windows don’t open. I don’t know why they don’t do that. It’s a real problem. So it’s very dangerous. And she was choking and rubbing her eyes. Fortunately, there was enough oxygen for the pilot and copilot to make a safe landing in Denver. But she’s safe and sound.”
The Huffington Post explains that the "main reason airplane windows don't open is because there isn't enough oxygen at cruising altitude to keep passengers alive. (The fear of window or cabin failures, which would lead to potentially fatal hypoxia, is why many planes are equipped with emergency oxygen masks.)"
Read more: http://www.digitaljournal.com/
