Ask the pilot

A catalog of horrors: Wings falling off, gashed fuselages, and sensationalist bloggers.

By Patrick Smith

Read more: Technology & Business, Airplanes, Airlines, Business, Airports, P. Smith, Ask the Pilot

Jan. 6, 2006 | On Dec. 26, an in-flight decompression struck an Alaska Airlines MD-80 shortly after takeoff from Seattle. A foot-long gash was later found in the plane's fuselage. The damage was apparently caused by a baggage handler who struck the plane with a loading cart, then failed to report the accident. What may have initially appeared as a minor skin crease became a full-blown rupture under the forces of pressurization.

The alleged perpetrator was a non-union worker employed by an Alaska Airlines subcontractor, providing yet more kindling for the growing controversy surrounding air carrier outsourcing. Last spring, in a cost-cutting move, Alaska's baggage- and ground-handling operations were taken over by a British company, Menzies Aviation. Menzies workers replaced more than 500 positions formerly held by higher-paid Alaska employees.

A hole in an airplane is a serious matter, for sure, but this was not an explosive decompression, and the MD-80 remained structurally sound. The emergency descent and return to Seattle were straightforward and by-the-book, presenting little danger to the plane's occupants. This is one of those rare instances where, at least at the outset, the press and media actually got it right, with a modest volume of coverage and some levelheaded analysis.

Unfortunately, much attention soon became focused on the blog of Jeremy Hermanns, a private pilot who was a passenger aboard flight 536. His photos from the MD-80's cabin, including a digital self-portrait complete with plastic mask, were picked up by newspapers around the country, while interview requests began to pour in.

I found Hermanns' account of the incident, which he describes as "horrific," and "the unthinkable," to be luridly overblown. He confuses the smell of activated oxygen canisters as that of commercial jet fuel, which he wrongly identifies as "AV-gas" or "JP4" (it is neither). Hermanns said repeatedly that he believed the fuselage hole was located at the back of the aircraft. Some news stations actually showed an MD-80 with graphics inexplicably pointing to the jet's rear pressurization outflow valve as the purported hole -- well aft, and on the opposite side, of the damage. "Ask the Pilot" obtained this photograph from an Alaska Airlines employee (who asks to remain anonymous) showing the actual puncture. As you can see, it is well forward of the wing.

Along with dozens of other readers, I went ahead and left some comments on Hermanns' blog. The majority of passengers, I wrote, could not be blamed for feeling scared and confused. It was noisy, and no doubt disorienting for many of the plane's occupants; the need for the crew to initiate a rapid descent would have been frightening to those who didn't understand what was happening. But it was not a life-threatening situation. The plane lost cabin pressure and so the pilots descended as quickly as possible to a lower altitude. They did nothing heroic or unusual, and will be the first ones to admit it. As professional airline pilots, they did what they're supposed to do. Any other crew would have done the same thing. The passengers, meanwhile, assisted by the cabin crew, could breathe using their drop-down masks.

Now, different kinds of in-flight decompressions can result in different situations -- some more hazardous than others. Bombs, for example, can tear apart an entire fuselage in fractions of a second. Large-scale structural failure, like the infamous fuselage burst of an Aloha Airlines 737 in 1988, in which a flight attendant was killed and the airplane nearly destroyed, can be similarly disastrous. A year later, nine passengers were ejected from a United Airlines 747 when a defective cargo door came unlatched after takeoff, peeling open a portion of the fuselage. And in 1973, another blown cargo door brought on the collapse of the cabin floor and one of the most horrific crashes of all time -- that of a Turkish Airlines DC-10 outside Paris, killing 346 people (the DC-10's door was later redesigned).

But those are extremely rare occurrences, and that's not what happened to the Alaska Airlines plane. The breach was a small one, and once the cabin pressure had escaped, it could be reasonably assumed that the plane was going to stay in one solid piece and fly just fine. Which it did.

Hermanns reminds us that he's a private pilot, but he seems to have been just as needlessly panic-stricken as all those non-pilots around him.

Most of this was included in my post on Hermanns' blog. He promptly deleted the entire thing. Believing it might have been a mistake, I later reposted the identical text. Again, it disappeared within minutes.

My dissection was meant to be instructive and helpful, and I certainly have no association with Alaska Airlines. Yet he chose to censor it. It's interesting, because he had no problem leaving up many rude and offensive comments, but deleted mine because they didn't fully jibe with his contentions. I complained to Hermanns and asked why he'd done this. Here, consolidated for clarity, is his reply:

"Your statements literally amazed me. This was a careless accident caused by, and not reported by, a baggage cart operator impacting the plane's fuselage. I was unaware a foot-long hole tearing open in a fuselage at full altitude while traveling at cruise speed isn't that serious. I hope you got paid a grip of cash to write that article. And, yes, I did delete your technical fluffery. Next time, try to address the situation at hand, not the imaginative one. Nice try, PR hack!"

For good measure, he included this postscript: "Please don't reply -- I probably won't read it." A follow-up e-mail later that afternoon was even more belligerent.

My post discussed neither the cause of the incident, nor who was at fault; that's an altogether different topic. I addressed only Hermanns' description of the in-flight events and the realities of a depressurization, to let people know that from an after-the-fact and objective point of view, the plane was in little danger of crashing. Hermann himself had no idea there had been a fuselage breach, or how it was made, until well after the aircraft had returned to Seattle.

If anyone was working the P.R. angle, it was Hermanns, with his theatrically mask-strapped mug splashed on newspapers and on "Good Morning America," describing a loss of cabin pressure as "horrific" and "the unthinkable." And it's craftily moderated Web pages like his that make many people scoff at the notion of bloggers as journalists.

As for the truly horrific and unthinkable, let's change setting from West Coast to East Coast.

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