Pilots reveal their scariest near misses

Pilots reveal their scariest near misses
Surely you can't be serious? Readers have heard some worrying annoucements in the sky

If Reddit is anything to go by, air travel is a lot riskier than you think.

A discussion on the website this week called for pilots to reveal what was the “closest disaster you’ve averted on a flight that the passengers had no idea about?”

It has attracted almost 5,000 comments in less than 48 hours, with the following tales among those most likely to worry nervous fliers.

Pressure drop

I am a commercial airline captain on a newish Embraer 175. Probably one of the scarier things I have had happen was when one of our cabin pressure control channels failed and we started to rapidly lose pressurization.

Pressurization is important because the air is so thin in the flight levels, specifically above 30,000 feet. The higher up you get the less "time of useful consciousness" you have, down to about 30 seconds. So it is a pretty scary thought and it is a problem requiring immediate action, usually a steep emergency descent, during which you will not hear from the pilots because we are super busy.

Our pressure controller has two channels and automatically switches to the second if one fails. We were flying along about to start our descent and briefing our arrival and our ears started popping, like mad. I looked over and the pressurization was climbing very fast. We started a steep, but not quite emergency descent, while I flipped the pressurization switch to manual and then back to auto. This manually switched the channel to the working one and we could continue without problem.

More scary in-flight announcements"I just want to tell you both good luck, we're all counting on you"  Photo: ALAMY

Pretty sure all the passengers noticed were their ears popping. It gave us about 80 seconds of a scare though.

The funniest part was that when we landed our maintenance control wanted us to "defer" the pressurization channel over the phone, meaning we will fix it later (generally a very safe way to get flights out on time with something minor or redundant broken). I told him I was going to have to insist that someone come over and actually look at the plane to say it was safe to fly.

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An air traffic controller writes

Had a pilot go NORDO (that's when, for whatever reason, they aren't on my frequency anymore. They didn't get the right one, misheard, or their radios crapped out). It happens fairly often, and there are a number of things we can do to get you back in the right place.

This particular guy, however, went NORDO at precisely the worst time. He was going eastbound, which means he was at an odd altitude. He lost his radio, and his flight plan then had him turn southbound. That means he was supposed to be at an even altitude, which he obviously wasn't.

There were about a dozen different planes going northbound that were at his altitude, so he ended up running one heck of a gauntlet through all these people as I was descending and climbing them to get them out of his way.

Are fliers told their plane is going down?"Remember all those planes I had to move out of his way? He managed to put himself right back into them"  Photo: ALAMY

Then, apparently in an act of sheer ignorance on the pilot's part, he decided to choose an even altitude all by himself, knowing he should probably be at one.

Remember all those planes I had to move out of his way? He managed to put himself right back into them. When you have closure rates of over 1,000 knots an hour, that's not a lot of time to react to those things. At the end, my a****** was clenched so tight that when I stood up, the seat came with me.

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The wheels fell off

I am a pilot (single engine, small aircraft only), but one flight I was a passenger on, the pilots avoided telling us about a disaster until we were about to land.

On a flight to Florida, one of the front wheels fell off during takeoff. Luckily, the front of the passenger aircraft had 2 wheels, side by side, so we weren't doomed. But no passenger knew about the problem until we were 15 minutes from landing in Florida. The pilot told us that the wheel fell off, and we had to do an emergency flyby. They had ambulances and firetrucks lining the runway, and as we landed, we pulled a really long wheely, keeping the only remaining front tire off the ground as long as possible.

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In the dark

My friend was a co-pilot on a commercial flight I was on from Toronto to Los Angeles and it was the scariest flight I have been on and getting the co-pilot's perspective after the flight made it even scarier.

The flight went very smoothly until we were making the decent into Los Angeles airport (LAX) just after 10-PM. I was looking out the window and it seemed as if we were 20 metres from touching the runway when all the lights began to flicker and the plane went into complete darkness! Immediately, you could feel and hear the engines thunder into overdrive and we pulled back up.

What causes turbulence, and is it dangerous?"As we came to a stop, you could feel the relief within the cabin"  Photo: ALAMY

Plane continued rising and we began to circle the air in complete darkness as everyone begins to share concerns. The flight kept circling for about 20 minutes before the pilot came on explaining they were having some technical problems, and they are discussing with the ATC to resolve the issue and make a safe landing. The circling in the air continued for nearly an hour but it seemed like an eternity in pitch black. Lights never came on, and we were notified we were going to make an attempt to land. People say this all the time but I can assure you, THIS was one scary decent! The bumpiest decent I have ever been part of. We were constantly being lifted from our seats, the seatbelt light really had merit this time. People were screaming each time and I was actually holding onto the arm rests and we kept defying gravity and swaying left and right. When we saw the lights on the runway inch closer, the plane slammed onto the runway and we once again heard the engines roaring as we slowed down on the runway. As we came to a stop, the plane just stayed there and waited on the runway for a tow to the docking area. You could feel the relief within the cabin. If everyone was sitting on toilets, I can assure you, each one would need a flush.

After we arrived, I met with the Co-Pilot a few hours later, as we had planned to meet for a day before he had to fly out of town. He explained they lost electrical power and had lost several forms of communication and flight information was not available to the pilots. Ultimately, the pilots had to land the plane manually with nearly no assistance or outside help. Considering it was night time, poor visibility and limited flight information available, this made for a very s***** landing. He admitted as well it was the scariest flight he has been on.

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Runway near-miss

My father was a captain for Eastern Airlines and told a story about almost being at takeoff speed when another commercial jet taxied across his runway. He was going too fast to abort so he had to pull up early and cleared the other plane by feet (don't remember the exact amount). His passengers had no idea but the other plane's passengers saw everything. I don't know what ended up happening to the other pilot, but my dad got an apology call from him that evening.

Joyrides gone wrong

I used to fly vintage biplanes and take people up on "joyrides" effectively. We would do aerobatics, let them fly it for a bit, and come back for tea and medals. We also did air displays and wingwalking. As these aircraft were built in the 30's/40's, there was several times where the s*** was hitting the fan, and as the cockpits are separate, they were blissfully unaware.

Some good examples:

1) Engine exploded during flight (big end failure, blew a hole in crankcase), landed in a field. Passenger was French and just thought landing in a field was what we did at the end... He couldn't understand the mayday on the radio.

2) We used to land on a grass runway, had a tyre blowout (one and only time), we must've stopped in about 50m (normal run on is about 200m ish). Passenger had no idea until I had to get fire crew out to help push aircraft back to the hangar and he thought the whole thing was great.

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Thrust reverser fail

The closest I've come to a disaster was almost a decade ago when during cruise the thrust reverser suddenly unlocked on engine 2. This was one of those near hypothetical failures we trained for in the simulator but you'd never expect to see in real life. We immediately pulled that engine back to idle because should it fully deploy on cruise power the resulting yaw motion could easily cause structural damage. Playing with the throttle we found that the 'thrust reverser unlocked' warning only appeared at a high power setting. After a short consult with maintenance we decided to leave engine number 2 running at low power: allowing us to continue the flight to our destination, while not being at risk to overstress the airframe should it deploy. Shutting the engine down completely would have meant we had to divert to an alternate airport because the remaining engine can't provide enough power to generate the electricity, pressurization and thrust required to continue to our destination at cruising altitude.

Passengers may have noticed a reduction in engine noise from the right-hand side of the aircraft and a slight delay, but apart from that there was nothing that could indicate something was amiss.

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100 feet from disaster

Less than a week after I got certified, I had the closest call of my career...

It was the end of a swing shift on a Friday night with just myself and my watch supervisor. We were waiting for a formation flight to come in and land for the night. Near the end of the shift, we received inbound information on them and a few minutes later they tagged up on radar, marked overhead(landing maneuver) and full stop.

For those who don't know: An overhead manoeuver is a type of tactical approach very common in the military. It is basically a descending 360-degree turn that starts over the approach end of the runway at an altitude of 1,500 to 2,000 AGL and is complete when the aircraft is established on final.

Any way, the formation was 4-mile initial for the overhead when approach control called up with a medevac helo 15 miles north east inbound with a critical casualty requesting transition through our airspace. Given the relation of my two aircraft and the position of the helo, I told the approach controller "transition approved, you guys can keep them (on comms), our aircraft are going to be on the ground in a minute."

My aircraft begin their tactical manoeuver to land and I give them their landing clearance. Not worried about the situation, I turned around and chatted with my supervisor about what we were doing that weekend. I glanced over and the first aircraft was turning his base-leg to land and assumed the second aircraft behind him would do so as well shortly.

Our conversation ended abruptly by the sound of our radar's PCAS(alarm), alerting us that a collision was imminent. I looked at the radar and the second aircraft and the helo were nose-to-nose, less than 1 mile apart, at the same altitude. I keyed up and gave a traffic alert to which I recieved a short pause, followed by a calm "we see 'em." The targets passed over one another with the indication of the same altitude, which means they came within 100 feet of one another.

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Engine failure

Piloting a small aircraft for a sightseeing flight with 3 passengers I once experienced an engine failure.

This was partly self-inflicted and a valuable learning experience. 5 minutes in flight I saw the right fuel tank was empty. Because I've looked in the tanks before departure and as the indicators are far from reliable I suspected instrument failure over a fuel leak.

Letting go of the controls the aircraft flew straight and level as you'd expect when having 2 equally filled tanks. Still, I'd rather be safe than sorry so I decided to lean the fuel/air mixture a bit to optimize fuel economy (Generally the fuel mixture in an aircraft's piston engine has a bit more fuel than required for combustion. The evaporated non-combusted fuel cools the engine from the inside).

Keeping an eye on the engine temperature I started reducing the mixture when suddenly the engine stopped, the aircraft went completely silent and started to glide.

Pushing the nose a bit to keep the propeller windmilling I applied the emergency checklist from memory and the engine roared back to life at full mixture.

I told my passengers I had to shift gear, while they remained completely oblivious about what just happened. Back on the ground we found that one of the 2 magneto's providing electricity to the spark plugs had failed.

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I’m not a pilot, but…

I'm going to do the typical "not a pilot but" here, but my Dad is a pilot and has had some interesting ones. The worst was when he was taking off (or maybe landing, I don't remember too well) from Manchester in a DanAir charter jet (this was in the days before TCAS was fully implemented) there was a trainee air traffic controller on duty. Whatever caused him to do it I'm not sure but he had accidentally sent my Dad's plane and a British Midlands jet in a straight course for each other. He got the message on the radio saying "Descend immediately" and as they did so the British Midlands jet passed over them, filling up the entire windscreen. I don't think any of the passengers ever really knew what happened at the time due to the fact it was at the front of the aircraft but they very nearly collided.

And finally… the voice of reason

In 7 years and 6,000 hours of commercial flying - nothing close to a disaster has ever happened.

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27 reasons why you shouldn't be put off flyingYou're more likely to die from falling out of bed than in a plane crash  Photo: GETTY

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