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By Root 299 0

must be a hole in the plane of some sort and wondered what if people got sucked out like some kind of horror film. I feared we would suffocate or the plane would crack in half and we would fall to our death. It sounds a bit clichéd but I thought; “I’m too young to die”.’ In the seat next to her, brother Ben was having no such qualms. Once he had secured his oxygen mask he calmly put his headset back on and tuned in to the in-flight music. ‘Once Ben and I both had our masks on and felt confident with them, I looked around – there were aisles and aisles of pale faces. We started to descend as if we were coming in for a steep, quick landing as the captain guided the plane down to a safe level where cabin air pressure was restored,’ she said.5

The calming voice of veteran Qantas pilot Captain John Bartels came over the intercom. Rachael Angley said the pilot reassured passengers and crew. Another passenger recalled him saying: ‘There’s a large hole in the side of the plane. I don’t know how it got there.’6 In a statement released later, he described the crucial moments after his Boeing 747-400 series jet suddenly depressurised over the South China Sea on Friday 25 July 2008 with 365 passengers and crew on board. ‘As soon as we realised there was decompression, I immediately pulled out my memory checklist. There were three of us in the cockpit and we all worked together and focused on doing what we had to do to get the aircraft down safely, which is exactly what we are trained to do. I have no doubt every Qantas captain in the same situation would have had the same result. Throughout it all, the cabin crew did a tremendous job of looking after our passengers.’7

In fact, they didn’t. Air Transport Safety Bureau investigators interviewed all the passengers and crew after the incident and were told that some of the junior cabin crew had frozen when the cabin lost pressure. The preliminary ATSB report said: ‘Several cabin crew members had become very distressed during the depressurisation and were initially unable to carry out emergency tasks. Senior cabin crew reported that those staff were withdrawn from duty for a period, after which they were able to resume duties and assist passengers.’8

That was not the only problem. ‘The oxygen masks were fucked,’ said passenger David Saunders from St Kilda in Victoria. ‘The elastic was so old that it had deteriorated. I couldn’t get it around my head. In fact, there was one area where the masks didn’t drop down at all.’9 Other passengers reported that people’s faces appeared to be going blue in the five and a half minutes it took to get to the safer lower altitude. Some of the passengers were wearing the masks but had not pulled them in order to activate the flow of oxygen. The ATSB report confirmed that there were some isolated problems, although 476 oxygen masks had successfully deployed. The forward crew rest and customer support manager masks had not dropped down, the air hose on the mask of seat 4K was not attached, and the centre overhead passenger service unit in row 53 containing the lights, air vents, seatbelt signs and crew call button was dangling down. As the plane depressurised, the cabin crew had grabbed their nearest available mask. Some sat with passengers and one even used the mask in a toilet.

Rachael Angley said: ‘Ben and I fly internationally at least twice a year and have become slack when listening to the safety instructions at the beginning of the flight. At that instant I wished I had listened harder this time.’10 It would have been no use tuning in to the normal audio track on the safety video – it was not working. Instead, the cabin services manager had to recite the familiar safety briefing over the cabin’s public address system.

On the flight deck the first officer had been flying the plane when he heard a ‘loud bang or cracking sound’ and felt a jolt to the airframe.11 The automatic pilot disengaged and the first officer took manual control of the aircraft. Multiple warning lights flashed around the cockpit, including ones warning about the cabin altitude