You can do an experiment at home. Your water system is at about 40 psig. You probably have an air compressor (for airing up tires if for nothing else) that can be set at 40 psig. Look at the hose diameter on the air compressor and adapt your garden hose to the same size.
Now take a ping pong ball and hold it over the end of the garden hose and turn it on. The ball flies out of sight. Do the same thing with the air hose. The ball flies out of sight.
Now try it again with a golf ball. With water the golf ball goes up a couple of feet and stays there. Same outcome with air. Pressure is pressure, force is force. As long as a pressure acts on a surface the force is the product of pressure times area. In near field effects, your Victaulic fitting would reach about the same velocity before it falls out of the flow stream in either an air test or a water test. Once the projectile falls out of the flow stream, in either case the remaining pressure will cause the fluids to flow harmlessly (except for the risk of the liquid soaking into carpets etc) until the pressure is depleted.
The source of all the fear and superstition surrounding pneumatic tests is a paper written on NASA letterhead (the paper is no longer available from NASA) by a summer intern (who I sincerely hope failed out of his engineering program and is now a floor manager at Wal-mart). This neophyte calculated the energy stored in an entire pipeline and assumed that every bit of this energy was instantly available at any particular point along the line. What utter nonsense. I hope the senior NASA engineer that approved the paper has been demoted to washing test tubes. For the energy in any control volume along that pipe to participate in an explosion, that energy must be present at the site of the failure. The energy in a fluid stream is transported by mass flow. Moving mass to the failure site takes time. Even at sonic velocity of 1300 ft/s, a cubic inch of mass located 5 miles away would take 20 seconds to reach the failure--at 20 seconds any projectiles have been at rest for 18 seconds or more and have been out of the flow stream for over 19.5 seconds. After any projectile has moved something like 6 times the diameter of the opening it will be removed from available force and will have reached maximum velocity. From that point on you have a decelerating projectile and a blowdown stream.
Force is force. The difference between a pneumatic static test and a hydrostatic test is the amount of mass that must be removed from the system to reach atmospheric pressure. For gas PV=nRT, so the amount of mass that must be removed can be huge. For liquid the amount of mass is a function the Bulk Modulus (a very small number) so you only have to remove a very small fraction of the total mass to depressurize.
David Simpson, PE
MuleShoe Engineering
In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. Galileo Galilei, Italian Physicist