That would depend on:

a) what the cabin altitude got up to
b) whether the masks did or did not flow oxygen

Neither of which we know

I believe you can get to FL250 within 2 minutes (or FL 100 with 4 minutes), the passengers will not have damage from hypoxia even if they did not don oxygen masks. Perhaps some with heart conditions might be worse off. This would only not be possible if you had explosive decompression and structural damage to the plane, or if the *pilots* failed to use their oxygen masks in time.

The issue in Malaysia is not the condition of their aircraft, most of which are quite new.The real issues are too rapid expansion, with incomplete DCA oversight of operations (poorly trained or under qualified airline inspectors) and weak airline training departments.

The very things that tend to give pilots problems, like NON PRECISION approaches are not trained properly.A higher focus on on-time performance rather than safety is common.In one recent simulator check session for example, the DCA examiner did no briefing nothing, no questions what so ever, then no debriefing afterwards.This is very very poor in my opinion.

Get Down
 

I would like to return to these words.
Last night I had the good fortune to watch "Sully", shortly before the aircraft hit the water the Flight Attendant shouted "Get Down", in fact one shout was directly into camera.
The original incident happened and the film made long before Air Asia's return to Perth.
So it's not a language misunderstanding, it's the way it is.

You compare a ditching situation with a decompression?
Sullys crew got it right.

If you'd care to read before commenting, this was an Indonesia AirAsia flight QZ535.

Chrome.Yes you are correct, however, having worked in airlines in both countries the country name can be interchangeable within my reply.The over arching issues are the same, just as the airline in question is the same name in either case.I have a lot experiences in both countries to confidently stand by my opinion.Seen it so many times.Will never change.Sad...

Report released today
 

WA Today has story about plummeting 11m/s

http://www.watoday.com.au/wa-news/pl...22-gzqnm4.html

(Caution, bugsmasher input:)

11m/s, that's about 2150 fpm. So descending from FL320 to FL100 would take about 10 minutes. Isn't that a rather "mild" emergency descent for an A320? I've seen figures of 1500-1800fpm elsewhere on 'prune for careful descents when suspecting airframe damage.

It has no real point. Apparently Airbus put the requirement for a PA into the checklist after the Helios 737 accident, so that having seen the masks drop the crew know that the pilots are actually still alive. Utterly pointless waste of effort, at a time when you have much better things to do.

And the next item in the CL is not much better. "Signs on" is, I think, the result of some people being injured in a depressurisation in a test 330, which was pushed quite violently into the descent. There is no reason for the entry to be any different to a normal descent. People will be unstrapped, signs or not. If you spill their drinks, you didn't do it right!

Why on earth do you need to make someone weightless for the emergency descent entry. There is no reason for it not to be quite gentle. After all the attitude change is only a few degrees.

11 m/s
 

I only experienced one ‘for real’ emergency descent on a certain 3 engined aircraft, the outer 2 engines of which could use reverse in the air. With Nos 1 & 3 at max reverse and No 2 at idle, the stopwatch timed rate of descent was 22,000 fpm. 11 m/s must have been a very sedate and gentlemanly affair.