CLOSE- MISSED air accidents especially with flights coming in and out of Guyana should not be taken lightly. Traveling on an airplane is one of safest methods of traveling, but a tiny error could cause things to go haywire. I read with interest the decompression incident which caused a Delta Airlines aircraft to make two separate landings over the same incident. How odd. Again, our President was in an aircraft where events could have turned disastrous. The last time he was making his way into Guyanese airspace when the jet nearly collided with another aircraft just metres away. That would have been a major catastrophe.

But cabin decompression has caused its fair share of disasters in the past. Fortunately, those in the aircraft industry have learned well from those deadly situations and have worked assiduously to make aircraft traveling much safer. Before one understands the context into which the incident aboard Delta last Sunday, we need to be aware that the air just above 10,000 feet is too thin for the average human to survive. Therefore, to survive flying 35,000 feet, the aircraft has compressed oxygen into the cabin. Now all that pressure in the fuselage (with oxygen pressing) causes it to expand and contract (not visible to the naked eye) as if to make it breathe in and out. It’s remarkable, really, how these machines work. Should the fuselage give way (as it did on Aloha Flight 243 [1998]), a large portion of the fuselage would be torn off and passengers would experience mid- air decompression which would cause many of them to be sucked out of the aircraft, while others pant for oxygen. Aloha experienced faulty lap joint, metal fatigue (from the fuselage the aircraft was flying over the amount of years it was built to fly), and explosive decompression. Luckily, the skilled pilots managed to return the aircraft to a safe zone of 10,000 feet where oxygen levels were good, only one flight attendant perished as she flew out of the broken fuselage.

But the Delta incident brought Helios Flight 522 of August 2005, bound for Greece, to my mind. Investigations later revealed, that on that flight, mechanics forgot to turn the pressurization switch in the airplane from manual (to which they changed it to do pressurization tests earlier) to automatic. That simple error caused catastrophic results. Everything was okay for a few minutes into flight, as the plane climbed to cruising altitude of 34,000 feet. However, after a few minutes, passengers started to feel nauseous. After the oxygen levels reached dangerous proportions in the main cabin, alarms went off in the cockpit. Sadly, the pilots were baffled as to what the alarms meant. They had never encountered these signals before because cabin decompression due to the error in returning the switch from manual to automatic has never really happened before. Thus, while they were trying to troubleshoot the alarm with the airport and mechanics, the passengers’ masks deployed. These masks only provide oxygen for about 10-12 minutes, to give the pilot time to lower the aircraft to breathable air (10,000 ft). But the pilots did not even know what was going on in cabin. So what happened? The pilots themselves passed out, and the passengers passed out with asphyxiation. The plane flew itself for quite some time, before running out of fuel and finally crashing into the mountains of Greece.

Air decompression issues and engineers’ oversights should not be ignored—ever! Too much is at stake.