Is it possible for the front window of an airplane located near the captain's seat to break under extreme circumstances like a bad landing?

Answer 1

Anything's possible, but it really depends on what kind of plane it is. The larger the plane, the more heavy duty the windows are. Commercial airliners are rated to withstand a pretty large amount of force at a higher altitude. Smaller planes aren't rated at all and break about as easily as a window in a house. == Probably not. It is possible that a portion of the instrument panel can fall down during a hard landing. Hail stones can cause severe damage to a windshield, but usually at high altitude when the aircraft is traveling faster. On the webiste airliners.net under Accidents, there is a copyrighted photo of a Boeing B767 window that cracked due to malfunction of the heating system on a flight from MBJ to ZRH about 3hrs before landing. And another photo of a Canadian CL-600 that was enroute from Harrisburg, Pa to Dallas/Fort Worth, Tx, when the first officers windshield "popped" at 40,000 feet. Also, there have been a few examples of a mid-air bird strike where a large goose struck the nose and crashed right through it and the pressure bulkhead and the instrument panel(or below it) and landed in the pilot's lap. ANSWER 3modern aircraft windows are made from laminated (multiple layers) of various strength high impact plastics - the laminations are designed so the window even if it shatters it holds together as a single unit - very rare for a modern aircraft window to come apart but what does happen is the window that breaks becomes opaque (you cant see through it) so a pilot would have to fly "blind" on insruments only Pilots are taught not to look out the windshield when they're flying under instrument rules. Switching from visual flight to instrument flight is a sure way to develop spatial disorientation and wind up flying into the ground. To answer the original question, it's possible for an airplane's windshield to break, but a landing bad enough to break a windshield would be bad enough to break the rest of the airplane. Impacts and failures of the windshield heater (airliner windshields are heated on every flight, and they are installed as inner and outer windshields so if an outer windshield breaks the plane doesn't depressurize) are what break windshields.