I thought it was an Onion story that Mitt Romney thinks airplanes should have roll down windows in the passenger cabin. Screen doors in the submarine, moon landings were faked and that sort of thing, but it's true. His remarks were prompted by the dancing horse lady's scary experience on a campaign flight last week when the cabin filled with smoke briefly.
Here's Mitt, "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 pilot and copilot do have their own oxygen system, but those oxygen masks in the cabin are connected to small chemical cylinders that generate oxygen in case of a cabin pressure failure. They are deliberately designed to not activate in case of a fire. In case you weren't paying attention in 3rd grade science (maybe because you were busy bullying the weaker kids), adding oxygen makes a fire burn better, a lot better. Not a good idea when you're trapped in an enclosed space. You know what works even better? Blowing fresh air on the fire.
Now he does have a valid point, the air masks could be designed to provide fresh air instead of oxygen. However it would be an engineering nightmare to create a system that would be reliable in an emergency. Not to mention that it would be really heavy, it would make more sense to get rid of the stuff that in an airplane that can burn, but airlines have always resisted that. It takes government regulation to make them do anything, something Mitt absolutely opposes. Even his window idea would never happen in a 'free market', even if it wasn't stupid.
This further illustrates why people on the right can never be taken seriously. They think they know 'stuff' without benefit of actually learning about anything. It doesn't occur to them to even ask the questions.
