frame, and they match the rectangular world of houses and trains. For a brief and hopeful moment in the early 1950s, airplanes had them too. Then the lesson arrived, and it arrived hard.
The shape of a stressed cabin
A passenger cabin at cruising altitude is essentially a balloon. Outside, the air is thin and cold. Inside, the cabin is pumped up to a comfortable pressure so we can breathe and stay warm. The difference between those two pressures pushes outward on every square inch of the fuselage, thousands of times on every flight, as the plane climbs and descends.
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