PLANE PLUNGES

The scariest moments
in air travel in 2012

December 19, 2012 Melanie Verran Yahoo! New Zealand

If you’re already a bit jittery when it comes to flying, stop reading here.

The year 2012 has been one of the safest on record for airlines – but there have still been plenty of terrifying incidents at 30,000 ft.

Plane plunges have to be one of the worst nightmares – and last month 30 people were injured in “10 seconds of terror” when an airliner plunged 1000 metres over the Atlantic.

The plane hit turbulence right as NEOS Air cabin crew were serving meals and plates went flying – along with anyone who wasn’t buckled in.

A similar incident happened on a United Airlines flight to London in July when itdropped 20,000 ft over the Atlantic and had to divert to Canada.

A “mechanical problem in the engine” was blamed for that one.

It was another mechanical failure that caused a four-hour 'vomitorium' on one flight in June when it lurched wildly from side to side.

The flight, that had been heading to New York, had to circle near Las Vegas for four hours to burn enough fuel to be able to land safely.

"The plane turned into a vomitorium. For five hours. And, after all that, I'm still in Vegas," Sarah Elizabeth Cupp wrote on Twitter.

But the passengers on an Emirates flight from Sydney to Dubai last month had an even more terrifying experience when they saw flames shooting from one engineafter it exploded.

The airline said it was an “engine fault”, but Auckland John Fothergill said flames lit up the entire cabin of the A380.

An Emirates Airbus A-380.  Photo / Getty

"You'd have to say there were two or three-metre flames.”

In June, footage emerged of a plane landing so violent it bent the aircraft's fuselage.

The All Nippon Airways plane bounced as it touched down, and the video shows the fuselage bent close to its wings and what appears to be ripples in the aluminium.

The discovery of the door of a Boeing 767 was also concerning when it plummeted to the ground in a Washington suburb – but even more worrying was that it wasn’t immediately clear which plane it had come from.

From Yahoo News

Peter’s Piece

It’s little wonder that some people are afraid to fly. Inaccurate and over-dramatic reporting will scare more people than airlines ever could.

‘Plane plunges’ are great for selling newspapers, but the term throws little real light on the reality of an incident.

The reporting of the ‘vomitorium’ incident simply doesn’t add up. Why would an aircraft carry so much fuel that it would have to stay airborne long enough to reach its intended destination in order to be light enough to land?

There was real peril in the skies when 

the pioneers in this book took to wings

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The United Airlines flight that dropped 20,000ft over the Atlantic because of a fault in the engine would lead people to believe that UA flies the Atlantic with single-engine aircraft.

Then we have the case of the plummeting door and the increased concern because it was unclear which plane had lost it. Well, perhaps that was because all the aircraft in the region were flying normally and short of all pilots doing a wing-walk up there, there may be no way of knowing which plane it belonged to.

Modern airliners have many doors of varying sizes in many locations on the fuselage, wings and engines, and only a few of them are critical to the safety of a flight. A falling door could be of some concern to people on the ground and I wouldn’t recommend standing in the way of a plummeting door for the purpose of getting a free ear-piercing.