Emergency Descent - 36000'
Fellas/Ladies,
Just a quick one to get your take on dealing with loss of cabin pressure at 36000'. I expect a lot of you browsing this forum have experience flying both military and civilian hardware and I'm looking for your perspective.
This is a second hand story from my father who was on board so the exact details are sketchy...
My parents were over France on a flight from Rome to Manchester this evening. Jet2.
The first my dad knew something was up was the Cabin Crew started to look concerned, looking at one of the cabin doors. They were on the phone a lot and then one of them started banging on the cockpit looking quite alarmed.
The next thing that happened was a very loud bang (the sound of the deploying oxygen masks, not an explosive depressurisation), the lights went off and then a very worried sounding captain or first officer almost screamed over the intercom "Emergency Descent" 5 or so times.
Panic obviously ensued as the plane bunted and dived for 10k. Oxygen masks full of dust and cobwebs and cabin crew looking like they were on the tower of terror and had little or no training (according to my angry Dad).
After the dive was over, the captain THEN explained that he had decided to deploy the oxygen masks manually and carry out an emergency descent. Based on advice from his airhosts or instrumentation I do not know, though anecdotal evidence of their reaction seems to suggest he may have acted independently.
I appreciate the above narrative lacks a lot of useful detail and I'm not looking for people to critique the captain's airmanship, mainly because by the letter of the law, getting down and letting the cabin crew know what was going on takes priority over not terrorising 150 odd unsuspecting passengers.
Have any of you had to rapid descend a big bird? If so, how drastic an emergency is it? If the crew consider there to be enough time to scream things like "emergency descent" over the intercom more than a few times do you disagree that there is time for them to take a few seconds for couple of choice words before exploding oxygen masks into passengers faces, killing the lights and bunting?
The first thing my dad said to me on the tarmac at Nice was "what would you have done?" to which I obviously responded with a Right Stuff Chuck Yeager line for the passengers. As I was not there and I have never been in that situation in a big jet this may very well be a bull%^&t answer...
What do you guys think?