For a limited time, and doing it in the most organized way possible… There is a very small possibility, but it exists!
I just can’t guarantee that the plane would be able to land after the experience.
Let’s analyze the plane first. We will use an A320 or a Boeing 737, to be among the most common today. One of these here:
We have, there, some unnecessary things for space flight… Wings and engines, for example. Alright, they’ll help us start the flight at a certain altitude and speed, but after that, they’ll be dead weight. And they will get in the way more than they will help.
What really matters there is the FUSELAGE.
The fuselage of such an airplane is capable of maintaining the internal pressure strong enough for us to breathe without the aid of extra oxygen in situations where the external pressure is only twenty percent of the internal pressure. And the fuselage was made to withstand greater differences. So probably if the plane just materialized at a hundred kilometers high (the official limit of space), it wouldn’t explode.
But it would have problems maintaining the internal pressure, since it is maintained by the engines that push air inside, which would not occur in space. I would say that if he stayed there for a minute or two, people wouldn’t die in there.
The problem is to reach a height of one hundred kilometers.
A plane like this has its operational ceiling (the maximum height at which it can fly) around fourteen kilometers high. There are still eighty-six kilometers to space. How to get there, if with your engines and wings it is impossible?
Yes, the obvious answer is “rockets”…
But you can’t just put any rocket anywhere on the plane and fire it. You have to find the best spots on the fuselage, places where the stress of acceleration wouldn’t be so great as to break the plane into pieces. It is very likely necessary to build a “frame” for these rockets. And they would have to be rockets using liquid fuel, so that the acceleration could be controlled (the plane wouldn’t be able to climb as fast as a Falcon9, for example). It would have to accelerate a lot slower, which would cause an increase in fuel consumption… Most likely most of the fuselage would have to be filled with fuel, making the plane heavier – it would be necessary to fill these new fuel tanks with the plane in flight, he would not be able to leave the ground so heavy -, which would reduce the number of seats available for such a glorious journey…
A “Merlin” engine… We would need several of these!
It would also be necessary to place small maneuvering rockets to be able to point the plane into space when the atmosphere becomes too tenuous. It’s more added weight…
So, assuming the falcon-9 plane was ready, and managed to fly with all these rocket engines and extra fuel in its fuselage, and reach fourteen kilometers high using its own engines… It would have to:
- Accelerate using the rockets slowly, so that the fuselage doesn’t break.
- Reaching the speed of sound AFTER clearing most of the atmosphere, to compromise the wings, tail and elevators as little as possible (soooo complicated, I know).
- Consume your fuel in as vertical a climb as possible (we’re not trying to go into orbit, we don’t need horizontal velocity).
- Reaching a height of one hundred kilometers and still having enough fuel to use the maneuvers and start the fall in the correct position.
- Rotate the rocket motors in the opposite direction, with the intention of slowing down during the descent. There would be no violent “re-entry”, because orbital speed was not reached… But even so, the free fall from that height would make the plane exceed the speed of sound, which would mainly compromise its wings, elevator and rudder.
If (and this is the biggest IF you’ve ever seen) all of this were possible (it probably isn’t, mainly due to the amount of fuel needed), the plane MAYBE manage to reach its cruising height, eject the bunch of rocket engines to gain more control, and make a heroic landing at the nearest airport…