Why Airplane Windows Are Round
Animated Short, 0:58. Published 2026-11-10.
Why are airplane windows round?
The story is made up; the science is real: every flight, a pressurized cabin swells and shrinks back, and stress piles up at sharp corners, so that's where metal fatigue cracks start. In 1954, cracks that began at a corner of a cutout brought down two of the first jet airliners (de Havilland Comet). Since then, airliner windows are rounded.
Sources: Report of the Court of Inquiry into the Comet G-ALYP and G-ALYY accidents (1955); Withey, Engineering Failure Analysis (1997); FAA AC 25.571.
Transcript
He made every window round. Every single one. Two companies are racing to build the first jet airliner, and whoever flies first gets every airline in the world. His boss sees the windows, and his face goes red. You're building a submarine! But he won't make a single one square. The other team cuts big square windows.
Wide, bright, perfect for the view. And they fly first. Their passengers get the whole sky. His get tiny portholes, and the papers call it the Porthole Plane. Then the flights pile up. Tiny cracks start at their window corners. After a hundred flights, a hair. After a thousand, a fingernail. Because every flight, the cabin puffs up like a balloon, then shrinks back.
And a sharp corner is where metal tears first. Way up over the ocean, one crack finally reaches the next window. Corner to corner. And the perfect plane starts to hiss, just as the seatbelt sign turns off.
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