Declaring an Emergency

[letMfly]

Originally Posted by back to Boeing

Now personally from a pilot perspective If I need to I’ll declare a mayday, and not bother downgrading till I’ve !!!! down and deal with the paperwork later.

Yup, MAYDAYs can be stressful!

[back to Boeing]

In the case of my mayday the first thing we did after securing the aircraft was head to the local shopping mall to buy civvies so we could go to the pub and get s**tfaced. Freudian slip if I’ve ever done one.

[good egg]

As a simple point of note, at my unit, if the aircraft in question is airborne then ATC can upgrade/downgrade the incident as deemed appropriate.
If the aircraft is on the ground it is the Airport Fire Service’s responsibility to upgrade/downgrade the incident.

There are many factors involved in the response to each emergency by outside services (including, perhaps for hospitals, moving existing patients, clearing non-urgent operations, etc.). It seems eminently sensible to downgrade an incident once ‘facts’ are established. On the other hand, you could play it out.

Those are decisions we make. That is part of our job.

[Gonzo]

Originally Posted by parkfell

I would suggest that an engine failure would result in an emergency being declared. There is however a school of thought that a simple flame out (loss of thrust) would only merit a PAN call on an Airbus 320.

Call me old fashioned, but when 50% of thrust/power is lost with a much higher percentage of performance that is a MAYDAY in my book every time.

Can you give me an example when a MAYDAY declared, and ATC “might not take any response at all”. I am curious.

As ATC, I don’t care what is declared by the crew for a 50% loss of power in terms of emergency response, my procedures will say what I have to declare as the emergency response (Local Standby or Full Emergency) based on the actual problem. If the crew declare a MAYDAY or PAN they’ll be given the appropriate priority over over traffic. I’ve had a 50% loss of power come in without declaring anything at all, but I still put on a Full Emergency.

Likewise for partial hydraulic failures, we’ve put Full Emergencies for those many times without any priority being declared by the crew.

I’ve also had MAYDAY declared for a sick passenger...this required no emergency response.

I still feel some here are conflating state of urgency with emergency response.

[FlightDetent]

Originally Posted by Gonzo

I still feel some here are conflating state of urgency with emergency response.

This sentence may be the first time great number of "us" heard about the difference between the two. If I had not overheard a conversation between ATC and ARFF folk by pretty much co-incidence years ago that I could not make any sense of, myself included.