Pressure-loss and Smoke at 10,000 Feet

I write a lot of shorthand. Not real secretarial shorthand but the kind that sums up major panicfests into four lines without even an exclamation point. A plane made an emergency landing at such and such a place after it filled with smoke. These people were hurt (or they weren’t), this broke on the plane (or it didn’t) and somebody broke something worse than a nail while exiting via the emergency slide (or they didn’t). I usually don’t have access to a lot of passenger interviews that talk about the terrifying moments between when they found out they were on a plane with issues, and when they were actually safe on the ground, and I mean literally on the ground, probably kissing it for good measure. Well, just because I don’t get a birds-eye view inside a plane showing everyone the human story while the pilots are duking it out in the cockpit for the sake of survival doesn’t mean there aren’t as many passionate plane stories as there are people in the plane. So I do have to apologize once in a while, for my tendency to rattle off the facts. I try to maintain my objectivity most of the time, so some of this news may come across as dull. I feel pretty certain no one aboard the planes feels like its dull.

So on 29-JAN-2014, there was an emergency landing in Delaware after a Mesa Airlines/United Express CRJ 700 (Canadair CL-600-2C10 Regional Jet CRJ-701ER) Dulles-Boston flight got smokey in the cabin, and the oxygen masks dropped down, both pretty good indicators that something was wrong. They made a safe landing though, in New Castle Airport. There was a loss of pressure, and they descended to 10,000 feet before they landed at 9:55.

In fact, here’s someone’s twitter about it, probably a passenger.