I think we've pandered enough to the media distraction of MO'L v. Hadow now. Too many professionals here are fueling it. I think this thread should be quartered immediately.
All the posts banging on about how if passengers listened to the initial Ryanair briefing they'd be informed enough to know how their masks work, are all wrong. They can go. Excise them please, moderators.
The Ryanair briefing tells people to pull down the mask fully. Courtesy only of itsresidualmate in this thread, those of us that have listened to the Ryanair briefing several hundred times in order to extract the last drop of survivability out of it, finally know what 'fully' means.
As for whether the rebreather bag is expected to inflate or not we have only learned about that today from SNS3Guppy in the other thread about why the bag doesn't necessarily inflate. Until I read this thread I'd never even considered the problem of any rebreather bag possibly being tight flat after my first few breaths.
I am not aware of anything in a Ryanair safety briefing about what to expect from any bag attached to any mask, merely a phrase counselling me to breathe normally.
So the reactions from the passengers, including Mr Hadow, who is no doubt used to trying to make sense out of his predicament, are all completely as someone like me would expect. Take them as complaints if you will. That says more about you than them. I take them as observations offered to those wishing to listen. I recommend listening.
On the other hand, the reactions of many of the RYR fleet pilots on this thread are rather surprising, I feel. One might have hoped RYR pilots are open-minded individuals first, and Ryanair employees second. Actually the ire directed at Mr Hadow is plain silly, as are the silly comments left on his website. Without his comments about the rebreather bag, no-one, including me, would have realised there is a potential communication problem about how to use a rebreathing mask if you've never used one before.
The "congratulations to the crew on a job well done" posts can also be excised I think. The "(anonymous) condolences to all those affected" are often rather diluting of real sentiment and unnecessary on the fatal accident threads, and get pruned. So the applause bit from people who really do not know anything about the pilots in this case other than the fact they were the pilots is about as perplexing as clapping on landing.
Anyway, unless you now better as an insider, congrats to the crew is all a bit premature don't you think? How do we know they didn't slip up and misconfigure or misinterpret something prior to the masks dropping? We don't yet, do we?
Anyway, the biggest disappointment in the whole thread is that the main question remains almost completely unacknowledged.
Never mind the halycyon days when there were 17 masks for 90 passengers and flying was risky business. Ryanair 737-800s cruise around eleven kilometres high. No-one can remain conscious up there for more than a faction of a minute without a full life support system.
It's not just a bus with a bit of airconditioning. The life support system was evidently thought to have failed or thought to have been compromised. Why please? How on earth did it happen?
I have said it before, but it needs re-emphasising, I think: There have been too many pressurisation incidents. I really don't think we should be seeing the backstop of emergency descent used quite so often.
I think it's interesting we've now seen it on a fleet as standard and one would hope constant as the RYR fleet upon which, The Real Slim Shady has quite rightly been laudibly telling us recently, they have an excellent automatic 24/7 self diagnostics 'phone home' telemetry(?) system which communicates constantly with a central station called 'Maintrol'(?) reporting the health of various aircraft systems irrespective of any crew reports.
Are we therefore considering a sudden and manufacturer's or maintainer's completely unpredicted failure here, or the knock-on from a known fault that was deferred according to rules which allowed it?