This week's scary headlines
Questionable events in the sky and on the runway
Well, it's been a wild week or so of news for the airline industry.
First, a Japan Airlines flight crashed into another plane on the runway outside of Tokyo. Sadly, only one person onboard the coast guard plane survived, while all passengers and crew escaped the Airbus 350 after the collision.
Then in the states, the plug-style doors on a Boeing 737 Max 9 blew off an Alaska Airlines flight after taking off in Portland.
It's one of those weeks where I get a little nervous when I hear an extra ding that I don't recognize, or landing seems to be taking a while.
Thankfully, a combination of timing, crew training and professionalism prevented what could've been worse outcomes in these incidents.
The plug-style exit doors blew off the Alaska flight at 16,000 feet. If this happened at cruising altitude, the people in the cabin and the crew likely would've been sucked out of the plane. Because of the relatively low altitude of the plane, the de-pressurization happened with less force than exists at 30,000 feet.
The flight deck received an alert about the rapid decompression and communicated with air traffic control so they could make an emergency landing. The oxygen masks released from the ceiling ensuring that the passengers and crew had oxygen in the thin air until they returned to the ground in Portland.
Then across the Pacific, a Japan Airlines flight collided with a coastguard plane on the runway at the Haneda airport. So far it seem that air traffic control had cleared the commercial plane for landing, while the earthquake relief plane had not yet been cleared for take off. This is still under investigation by the Japanese government.
In videos recorded by passengers, you can see a bright orange light glowing from outside the plane after it collides with the smaller plane and comes to a stop. The competent and fast-acting flight attendants recognized the 'bad exits' as we call them, and used megaphones to direct passengers to the three safe and useable exits.
All of the reports of the crash credit the success of the evacuation to the quick reaction of the cabin crew and the obedience of passengers. According to the BBC, the entire plane went up in flames as the last person, the pilot, exited the plane. The passengers’ willingness to listen to the flight attendants instructions to leave their carry-ons on board led to a complete evacuation of the plane in the nick of time.
Flight attendants were able to gain control of the cabin, direct 367 passengers towards the only three safe exits in the course of 18 minutes while a fire raged outside. Some of the slides even deployed at steep angles and no one missed a beat.
Respect and thinking about the collective good are both baked into the Japanese culture, and it clearly benefits them in instances like this.
Had anyone blocked the exits with bags or held up the rest of the cabin by being completely unaware of their surroundings, the outcome would be more deadly. American passengers, take notes. Like, a lot of notes.
In an opinion piece from the New York Times, Zeynep Tufekci explains that all of these incidents don't have as much to do with luck as with decades of learning from mistakes. As I've written about before, airline rules and regulations are written in blood.
It's the work of traffic control, cabin crew, mechanics, forensic investigators and even bureaucrats to keep flying a safe, or at least a safer, option than it could be.
In fact, the 737 Max had only been in service for eight weeks when the doors blew out. Pilots reported seeing a pressurization warning light on three different occasions before the incident, and mechanics cleared the plane to fly each time. But whoever was in charge at the top restricted the plane to over-land flights so that if an emergency landing needed to happen, it could happen on a runway and not in the middle of the Pacific.
Most nervous flyers fear turbulence as it can seem like the most obvious threat to a safe flight. But whether it comforts you or just the opposite, there's a lot more to be thinking about on the ground and in the air.
In my next newsletter, I'll tell you why there's no reason to worry about turbulence even when things feel shaky.
I hope this news results in the public taking stock of these near-disasters and realizing their lives are not just in the hands of pilots. I can't say I saw a difference in passenger attitudes on this last rotation. But a Dallas bus driver did give me a free ticket to ride after he learned about my job and we discussed this week’s news.
Thanks, man. You get it.
Stay fly,
Megan
Heard on the runway
Second hand news from unverified sources
Where in the world is Gambling Mabel? There’s a flight attendant out there with a penchant for the slots, according to a pilot I recently worked with.
“Have you heard of Gambling Mabel?” he asked us on the way to our hotel.
I listened with my eyes closed as he told the tale of a trip with her. The crew shows up to the layover hotel in Vegas and he sees Mabel beeline it to the lobby casino. She rolls her bag to a spot behind a planter, takes off her name tag and proceeds to sit down at the slot machines.
The next morning, the captain comes down from his room at report time to catch the crew van. There’s Mabel, still in her uniform. She gets up from the machines, grabs her roller bag and proceeds to the van for work. Way to do it all, Mabel.
Number one hates number two. One of my crew mates on this rotation recently met the most senior flight attendant at a legacy airline.
No surprise, she’s got a reputation. On one trip she told the crew to gather all the onboard whiskey and they complied. She’s obviously the boss.
She takes all of the mini bottles they found and pours them into a big, empty water bottle.
“Mamma needs her whiskey!” she says.
When he later asked her why she hadn’t retired yet after decades and decades of flying, she goes, “because I don’t want her in number two to become number one!”
That’s a reason for delayed retirement if I ever heard one.
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