Flying on a Plane?
If Reddit is anything to go by, air travel is a lot riskier than you think.
A discussion on the website this week called for pilots to reveal what was the “closest disaster you’ve averted on a flight that the passengers had no idea about?”
It has attracted almost 5,000 comments in less than 48 hours, with the following tales among those most likely to worry nervous fliers.
Pressure drop
I am a commercial airline captain on a newish Embraer 175. Probably one of the scarier things I have had happen was when one of our cabin pressure control channels failed and we started to rapidly lose pressurization.
Pressurization is important because the air is so thin in the flight levels, specifically above 30,000 feet. The higher up you get the less “time of useful consciousness” you have, down to about 30 seconds. So it is a pretty scary thought and it is a problem requiring immediate action, usually a steep emergency descent, during which you will not hear from the pilots because we are super busy.
Our pressure controller has two channels and automatically switches to the second if one fails. We were flying along about to start our descent and briefing our arrival and our ears started popping, like mad. I looked over and the pressurization was climbing very fast. We started a steep, but not quite emergency descent, while I flipped the pressurization switch to manual and then back to auto. This manually switched the channel to the working one and we could continue without problem.
Pretty sure all the passengers noticed were their ears popping. It gave us about 80 seconds of a scare though.
The funniest part was that when we landed our maintenance control wanted us to “defer” the pressurization channel over the phone, meaning we will fix it later (generally a very safe way to get flights out on time with something minor or redundant broken). I told him I was going to have to insist that someone come over and actually look at the plane to say it was safe to fly.
An air traffic controller writes
Had a pilot go NORDO (that’s when, for whatever reason, they aren’t on my frequency anymore. They didn’t get the right one, misheard, or their radios crapped out). It happens fairly often, and there are a number of things we can do to get you back in the right place.
This particular guy, however, went NORDO at precisely the worst time. He was going eastbound, which means he was at an odd altitude. He lost his radio, and his flight plan then had him turn southbound. That means he was supposed to be at an even altitude, which he obviously wasn’t.
There were about a dozen different planes going northbound that were at his altitude, so he ended up running one heck of a gauntlet through all these people as I was descending and climbing them to get them out of his way.
Then, apparently in an act of sheer ignorance on the pilot’s part, he decided to choose an even altitude all by himself, knowing he should probably be at one.
Remember all those planes I had to move out of his way? He managed to put himself right back into them. When you have closure rates of over 1,000 knots an hour, that’s not a lot of time to react to those things. At the end, my a****** was clenched so tight that when I stood up, the seat came with me.
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