Passenger Diego Murillo, who had been on his way to Ontario, California, said the gap was "as wide as a refrigerator" and described hearing a "really loud bang" as the oxygen masks dropped from above.
He told KPTV: "They said there was a kid in that row whose shirt was sucked off him and out of the plane and his mother was holding onto him to make sure he didn't go with it."
The BBC article notes that this section of fuselage can optionally include an extra emergency exit, but that Alaska does not select that option. Still, it may be constructed with a false opening the same size as the exit door which could have been there.
It seems odd to me that an emergency exit can be optional. Like I get that airlines reconfigure seating, number of bathrooms, storage, etc, but emergency exits seem like there should be a fixed number based on maximum distances between all exits or something.
Another comment elsewhere says it's not really optional, it's just down to the number of seats the plane has. For certain seat configurations it's required.
Maybe the reporter should have asked "do you mean a European sized fridge or American?". Obviously if it was a European fridge size hole I wouldn't have even bothered putting on my seat belt on. Heck, why didn't they just fly on to California if it was only European sized?!
Not only that, but the continent-level statistics aren't useful for much other than scoring Internet points.
State-by-state in the US, obesity varies between 35-50% IIRC.
There are also significant differences by race (black or hispanic highest, white non-hispanic slightly less, and Asian a LOT less).
If we're being honest, Europe has exactly nothing to brag about -- 1 in 5, or 1 in 4 obesity rates are still amazingly high. Just saying "not as high as the US" is a pyrrhic victory.
I've been to a few countries outside of Europe and the US. Obesity and lesser but unhealthy fatness may not be as widespread yet there, but they're not that far behind. Also, what some cultures consider "not fat" isn't actually "not fat." Plenty consider "chubby" to be perfectly normal (and even attractive).
Russia is also technically in Europe but a lot of Westerners don't consider Russians Europeans. So I see no reason why continental Europeans could't consider the British as non-Europeans. In fact, there are plenty of Western Europeans that don't even consider Eastern Europe as 'real' Europe.
Russia indeed spans both Europe and Asia but almost all Russians live in the European part and majority of all Russian history and culture happened or is linked to Europe, not Asia. Similarly Turkey technically is also in Europe (small part of Turkish territory) but nobody seriously claims that Turkey is a European country based on this technicality. Another example would be Israel which technically is not in Europe but is considered to be more European than Middle Eastern. So the Brits not being European is not really such an outlandish claim. Especially that there is a growing tendency for 'European' to actually mean 'related to European Union' instead of its original, geographic meaning.
(I'll use "soccer" for "Association football" below to avoid confusion. I'll use "field" rather than "pitch" because the FIFA "Laws of the Game" use "field" except in 3 places [1]).
The rest of the world uses a different size soccer field than the rest of the world. Not only do soccer field sizes vary country to country, they can vary from league to league within a country.
In American football the size is standardized, except for children's leagues. High school, college, and professional leagues all use 100 yards x 160 feet (91.44 x 53.3 meters).
Heck, soccer fields can even vary within a single league. Take the UK Premier League for example. A few years ago their fields ranged from Fullham's 100 x 65 meters to Manchester City's 107 x 73 meters. They have since tried to standardize on 105 x 68 meters but aren't there yet.
Premier league clubs not yet using 105 x 68 are Brentford (105 x 65), Chelsea (103 x 67), Crystal Palace (100 x 67), Everton (103 x 70), Fullham (100 x 65), Liverpool (101 x 68), Nottingham Forest (105 x 70).
For international play, the requirements are 100-110 meters for the long dimension and 64-70 meters for the short dimension.
There are some things that are standardized on a soccer field and so could be used as length references. The funny thing is that those things are all round numbers when expressed in feet or yards.
E.g., the radius of the circle around the center mark is 10 yds. The penalty area is 44 x 18 yds. The penalty mark is 12 yds from the from the goal. The goal area is 20 x 6 yds. The goal posts are 8 yds apart and the crossbar is 8 ft off the ground.
That's because these things were standardized before the UK switched to metric. I guess they didn't want to change the sizes just to keep the numbers round.
[1] there are two places where they say that the assistant referee should "face the pitch", and one place where they say the assistant referee should use his flag to indicate on what area of the pitch offside occurred.
In practice, they're very similarly sized. 90m vs 91.5m in length (on average). Widths are different but that's usually not relevant when describing the size of things as "half of a football field".
Football/Soccer, American/Gridiron Football, and Rugby all descend from the same class of sport that was just called football back in the middle ages (you played it on foot instead of on horse). Etymologically, neither sport called football really has any more claim to it than the other.
Football field? It was the size of a smallish door. Better analogies would be commonplace things like bathtubs or car doors, not dramaticlly oversized objects like fields or office towers. It was about exactly the size of the emergency exit doors we all see when lucky enough to be seated in an exit row.
As an American, I have never once in my life used a football field as a size comparison, nor have I heard it used as a size comparison for anything that wasn't roughly football field sized.
It might be used more commonly in some places, but I was baffled by the joke as well.
I actually think the stereotype comes not from normal Americans but rather from American journalism. It is in the news and magazines all the time. I am sure Google nGram could support this but I am heading out the door and can’t look it up until later.
He told KPTV: "They said there was a kid in that row whose shirt was sucked off him and out of the plane and his mother was holding onto him to make sure he didn't go with it."
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-67899564