Regardless of the cause, this incident has sparked considerable debate about commercial flights.
Should the passenger emergency air be able to maintain life in a decompression at the maximum altitude achievable by the aircraft?
Should cabin crew have enough endurance in their portable air to stabilise passengers, then react and enter cockpit if during a decompression the flight crew are non responsive?
Should the cabin crew have independent means of communicating with the ground, a comms system that can't be turned off in the cockpit?
Should low cost PLBs be available for deployment by cabin crew and passengers?
If there were a dozen PLBs onboard and none were deployed after an accident this would speak to probable survivability.
Is a live camera view of the cockpit that can be viewed by cabin crew or passengers out of the question?
After watching a well produced documentary a few days ago about the Qantas A380 that suffered a runaway engine, I am of the view that both passengers and crew are distancing ourselves from the perils of flying at 500 knots at 35000ft over hostile terrain in a machine controlled by a computer.
Pilots can't see even their engines or control surfaces, in the case of the A380 an action list that took 45 minutes to scroll through, cabin crew somewhat isolated from pilots and 600 lives at stake. The pilot commented that he was very fortunate to have a spare pilot on the flight deck who could go back and report on what the hell had happened, in the meantime copilot worked his way through the onscreen warnings, but with no way of knowing how many pages of warnings there were and how long it would take to get through them.