Spectators Balcony (Spotters Corner)If you're not a professional pilot but want to discuss issues about the job, this is the best place to loiter. You won't be moved on by 'security' and there'll be plenty of experts to answer any questions.
It may well be the case that they interpreted the Captain making the emergency decent call on the ACP/PA to the cabin, in FR usually the F/O (who automatically becomes PNF), is required to make the mayday.
who knows, its irrelevant anyway, the crew by the sounds of it carried out a textbook Emergency Descent, landed safely and the BBC publishes a passengers account (with probably zero technical knowledge) of "we all thought we were going to die".
well they didnt, in fact every one of them lived, as has every single passenger of the combined billions that has ever flown Ryanair, Easyjet, Bmibaby, Jet2 etc. not one fatality
millions of flights a year, 100's of millions of pax, you will get the odd tech failures. If only the BBC could show an ounce of rationale and balance rather than sensationalism.
This was the headlining story on the early evening news (I live on the Notts-Derbys border). The usual misinformed, sensationalist crap whenever there is a relatively minor incident.
Kinetic - Completely agree - I said much the same thing to my partner when he called me to say there had been an "incident" involving Ryanair.
My incident in the 1980's was reported by the local rag as;
Terror in the skies over ......, pilot was wrestling with the controls, aircraft clipped telephone wires, crashed on farm.
What actually happened was I landed without damage in a field after the top of the one of the pistons in a C-152 decided to leave the aircraft. I think I missed the telephone wires by about 200 feet.
Another report about a Kingair's single engine landing was reported thus;
The pilot had such a serious problem with the engine that he was forced to switch it off and use the spare one to stop the aircraft plummeting to the ground.
Hope the crews efforts are appreciated by RYR. Although if they had signed one of the new brookfield contracts their reward might be a bill for the whole incident, especially if they forgot to reconfigure the A & P panel !
"You could see the whites of the eyes of the people next to you. People were panicking but they weren't screaming or shouting," she said.
"You overheard the captain saying 'Mayday, mayday,' and he was saying it rapidly as we were going down. I thought my number was up."
more to the point - "FFS these people are allowed to write stories in the national media". I really don't know why the BBC have such a good reputation as their standard of journalism is utterly appaling. Zero technical accuracy, tabloid-esque headlines and massive polictical / environmental agenda bias. All together that makes them right alongside the daily mail etc for journalistic integrity.
I'm more interested in the posters comment above about the FO "automatically becoming PNF"? I'm not ryanair bashing, but i'm genuinly intrigued as to why that is. There are good human factors reasons why you should do it the other way round (FO - PF, Capt PNF / managing the situation) - but AFAIK theres no real reason for doing it that way. Ultimately theres little right or wrong in this situation - I'm just interested in the rationale behind that reasoning.
reminds me of a story way back - there were a number of cases of elderly people on Tyneside who were suffering from acute athritis in their hands - a local journo was desptached to talk to the local doctor and it was all very ho-hum until the Doc said just as they finished the interview "In the olden days in used to be called the Devils Claw syndrome...."
You can guess the next days headline in the local paper..............
"Devils Claw Horror in Jarrow!!!"
"you cannot bribe or twist , thank God, a British Journalist But seeing what the man will do, unbribed there really is no reason to"
As soon as I saw the article on the BBC website, I thought "let's head over to PPRuNe to read the obligatory outrage posts"
The thing is - every single time there is any incident involving any aircraft, the press will want to sensationalise it. Nothing is more attention grabbing than a headline about 'Terror in the skies'. That is their goal; to make a boring story interesting - be it by the judicious use of implication, factual inaccuracy or in many cases, downright fiction. As long as there are aircraft in the sky there will be incidents, and as long as there are incidents there will be sensationalism in the reporting of such, and the same predictable outrage expressed here.
What is anyone doing about this though ? I appreciate the idea of tackling the entire press on the subject of sensationalist reporting is a bit Canute-eque, but with all due respect, moaning on here about it and all agreeing with each other that it's outrageous etc achieves diddly-squat.
Perhaps people should start complaining to the press organisations that publish this nonsense rather than to each other on here. It doesn't do the industry any good to have "PLANE OF DEATH" headlines everytime there's a trivial incident, though to be fair, the pilots are usually portrayed as 'heroic', so it's not all bad. Yet, there never seems to be any response from the airlines or pilot unions when this drivel appears in print - which is, ultimately, fuelling a fear of flying - which can't be good for either.
What really surprises me is that it took the Levison enquiry for the public to realise the breathtaking lack of integrity in the "profession" of journalism.
Whenever we get these one of these gems from a journalist, I always wonder; is this deliberately or negligently misrepresentative?
757 Driver - it's the same at our place. I was told it was due to part of the actions being to try and re-establish / maintain some kind of pressurisation, and the controls for that are right above the FO's head. Otherwise you'd have the FO establishing a VMO / MMO descent while the Skipper is all over him / her trying to play with the pressurisation panel.
I saw the slot on BBC East Midlands news and it was rather over the top, but they did make the point that this was the second FR decompression incident with the 738 in the past couple of months.
