Before the usual culprits come out of the woodwork and have their usual salivating attack on journalists perhaps some of you should take just a bit more time and thought about what is actually being reported and from what point of view. In this instance, the reporter has accurately described the events in some kind of pressurisation problem from the point of view of one of the passengers.
Those of you so brave and willing to make smug commentary about a well executed emergency descent should remember that for the first few minutes of such an event are likely to be terribly frightening for the cabin crew and the pax alike. How many of you have been through such an event as pax for real? I'd be prepared to wager that not one of you!
Think about it for a minute before you engage your scathing criticism of the press. Yes, they do often get it wrong but if you were to take just a few extra minutes and analyse the report above you would realise that in this instance, apart from reporting the passengers thoughts and reactions, the report is accurate and unsensationalist. How would you write such a report for the consumption of the non-pilot readership?
Try to imagine how the passengers behind you feel if you had to perform an emergency descent for real after some sort of pressurisation failure. Whilst you are performing your duties and reacting with your training, donning oxygen, establishing comms, descending at MMO or VMO, assessing the problem, avoiding other a/c, talking to ATC, changing squawk, checking MSA and any other host of tasks the SLF are probably going through several minutes of sheer fright and confusion. What would be going through your mind if you were sat in the back? Better yet, what do you think would be going through the mind of your spouse/parent/child who is not a qualified pilot?
If you are going to have a feeding frenzy on the press then at least make sure you are feeding on the prey and not those who, as in this instance, have reported what appears to be an incident that had a profound effect on one of the pax and no doubt all the others too. Let's try and be a bit more mature and intelligent about how we discuss incidents like these and the real fears of the SLF who are nowhere nearly as au fait with what some of us are highly trained to deal with.