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TikToker Reveals Why Airplane Windows Are Round and Not Square

News Airports + Flying
by Jori Ayers Aug 4, 2021

When you’re assigned a window seat for your flight, do you ever look at the window and wonder why it’s round and not square like a window in a house? Well, for starters, that rounded shape is helping you and everyone else on the plane make it safely to your destination.

TikToker designsecrectsss, who reveals design secrets of everyday life, just divulged why airplane windows are round. In a video, they showed viewers the first commercial airplane, the 10r Comet, had square windows. The model also experienced three crashes within the first year of flight — all due to stress on the windows.

According to Mashable, when commercial flying was becoming popular, most airplanes began to fly at higher altitudes to avoid turbulence and drag. Since humans can’t survive at altitudes as high as 30,000 feet — and even higher — in the air, designers started to pressurize airplane cabins to create habitable environments.

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At high altitudes, air pressure outside decreases, becoming lower than the air pressure inside the cabins. As air pressure inside the aircraft grows bigger relative to the air pressure outside of it, the aircraft’s structure is stressed, as the metal literally wants to expand.

As designsecrectsss tells us, on the 10r Comet aircraft, that structural pressure built up on the corners of the square windows, which then created cracks in the structure of the plane and, eventually, tragic crashes. The video below gives you a play by play demonstrating the outcome of what can happen with square windows.

Thankfully engineers were able to catch this flaw and fix it to where we can now fly safely with round — well, oval — windows.

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