A lone M&M candy is racking up some serious air miles after a passenger spotted the shell-covered chocolate stuck inside the window of an Airbus A380 superjumbo during a recent Emirates flight.
Asking the question on everyone’s lip, ‘How did that get stuck in there,’ the passenger shared photos of the yellow M&M stuck behind the window of the double-deck jet.
A yellow M&M was stuck between the two window layers on a A380 I flew on
byu/dosharkshaveapenis inaviation
Judging by the state of the M&M, it looks like it had been stuck behind the window for some time, but most commentators on popular social media site Reddit couldn’t work out how it got there in the first place.
Some people, however, wondered whether the M&M had been dropped on the floor of the top deck of the aircraft before somehow falling through and crack and working its way through a wall seam before ending up in the window.
Others jokingly suggested that the engineers who built the plane had deliberately placed the M&M inside the window just to wind up passengers.
The truth, however, might be a little more boring. The good news, is that the M&M isn’t compromising the integrity of the window and there’s no risk that the window isn’t creating a secure seal inside the plane.
Windows on commercial aircraft have a flexible perspex panel that sits between the cabin and the main structural window, which prevents passengers from smearing the window, as well as adding a little extra insulation and preventing condensation.
On many aircraft, there’s a negligible gap between the perspex or acrylic pane and the main window. But as you can see from the photos, on the Airbus A380, there’s a pretty large gap between the perspex sheet and window – partly due to the shape of the cabin crew but also deliberately designed to make the windows look larger and allow more light into the cabin.
The perspex sheet isn’t a critical part of the window and can fairly easily manipulated. It’s probably the case that a bored passenger managed to create a gap big enough to push the M&M into the window, and no one from the airline had yet realized.
Designed to survive a knock or two, M&Ms date back to the Spanish Civil War when Forrest Mars Sr saw soldiers eating chocolate pellets coated with a hard shell to prevent melting.
Before becoming the popular snack they are today, M&Ms were sold exclusively to the US military as rations. Since the 1980s, M&Ms have flown a lot higher than the cruising altitude of a commercial plane, as they are regularly included as a food staple for space missions.
