NINE OXYGEN masks failed to deploy and cabin crew were reduced to banging on the cockpit door to alert the pilot during a serious incident on a Ryanair flight in September 2008, an air accident investigation has found.
Anxious cabin crew used ID cards in a vain effort to prise open the units where masks which had not come down were stored, according to the report of the Air Accident Investigation Unit.
The report criticises the flight crew for electing to continue climbing and pressurising the cabin when the nature of a problem arising from a bump heard during take-off was not known.
A sudden loss of cabin pressure was triggered when the flight crew carried out checks after the tail of the aircraft hit the runway during take-off. Doing this without fully appreciating the consequences was a contributory cause of the incident, the report states.
Ryanair, which has accepted the findings, has already made changes to its training procedures in response to the incident. It said the report showed that the tail-strike was a “minor scrape” and said the aircraft returned to Dublin as a precautionary measure.
Six crew and 148 passengers were on the flight, which left Dublin for London Stansted on September 11th, 2008. At take-off, the flight crew were aware of a bump but were not sure what had happened. Over four minutes passed before the cabin crew confirmed that a tail-strike had occurred.
As part of the checklist to be followed for such events, the pressurisation outflow valve was opened, thus causing the cabin to depressurise. Environmental conditions in the cabin then rapidly deteriorated, the report states, and the cabin supervisor tried unsuccessfully to raise the flight crew on the interphone.
“I ran to the front. I needed to inform the captain that we were having a rapid recompression. When I reached the front of the cabin I saw No 4 trying to drop masks from our jumpseat, it didn’t work. She was feeling very weak, she needed oxygen,” she told the investigation.
When the supervisor failed to reach the captain by phone, she banged on the door and established communication. After this, the passenger oxygen system was deployed manually but some masks did not deploy. “The passengers in the row in front of me did not have masks on and were striking the overhead cabinets with their fists to try and get them to open,” one passenger told the investigation. Other passengers helped them to move to spare seats where the masks had deployed.
The aircraft landed safely after 21 minutes in the air and one passenger received medical assistance.
The report says that while the tail-strike was not serious, what followed caused a serious incident which upset many passengers.
