To lose one passenger through a plane window, as in the tragic case last month of Jennifer Riordan, who died when she was half sucked out of a window on a Southwest Airlines flight from New York to Dallas, is disconcerting. When something similar happens to a pilot, “sucked halfway out” of a broken cockpit window on a passenger flight in China, as it did this week, you start to wonder whether storylines common in airline dramas are becoming a little too frequent in real life.

Riordan died of injuries sustained after she was sucked through a window that had shattered when an engine fan blade broke loose. What caused the cockpit windscreen on the Airbus in China to crack has not yet been ascertained. At cruising altitude, the pressure outside a plane is around two-and-a-half times lower than inside the cabin, so a broken window or a large hole in the fuselage can be catastrophic, causing a blast of air that will suck out seats as well as people. A devastating instance occurred on a flight from Los Angeles to Sydney in 1989 when a cargo door failed, tearing a large hole in the side of the fuselage and causing explosive decompression that led to the deaths of nine passengers when their seats were, in effect, ejected from the plane.

As with all aircraft accidents, the implications are troubling, but aviation consultant David Haward says serious decompression incidents caused in this way are rare and that each accident tends to be different. “This is not a frequent danger,” he says. “A lot of research work was done in the 40s and 50s to make sure it wasn’t a danger – double-skinned windows and precautions like that.” He also points out that the emotive phrase “passenger sucked out” is wrong. “The fuselage is pressurised, so they are being pushed out.” Whether that is any consolation is questionable.

In the recent US example, he says, the window didn’t break because of a design fault, but because part of the engine crashed into it. A passenger window is made up of three layers, and he says there is no recorded instance of one failing of its own accord. It would also take a very determined passenger, probably armed with a hammer, to break one. Cockpit windscreens are even tougher, designed to resist collisions with birds and lightning strikes. Haward says previous instances of breakages have usually been the result of maintenance failures. “These incidents are very rare,” he says. “There have been occasional incidents of doors being ripped off, but none recently. When I take flights, I always choose a window seat.”