AirAsia has again come under fire after a plane flying from Perth to Bali lost cabin pressure and was forced to descend rapidly.
AirAsia Indonesia Flight QZ 535 was about an hour out of Perth on Sunday when it dropped quickly from 32,000ft to 10,000ft, a standard procedure for a passenger jet which is depressurising, and a decision was made to return to the Perth.
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Oxygen masks were deployed and passengers were told to brace.
But worried passengers said cabin crew made the ordeal worse by their panicked response.
“The panic was escalated because of the behaviour of staff who were screaming, looked tearful and shocked,’’ passenger Clare Askew told Seven News.
“Now I get it, but we looked to them for reassurance and we didn’t get any, we were more worried because of how panicked they were.”
Another passenger, Mark Bailey, said the cabin crew started screaming "emergency emergency".
"They just went hysterical,'' he said. "There was no real panic before that but then everyone panicked.''
Perth woman Leah told Channel Nine passengers were kept in the dark about the emergency.
“One of the stewardesses started running down the aisle and we thought, why is she running,” she said. “And then the masks fell down and everybody started panicking.
“Nobody told us what was going on.”
The aircraft’s 145 passengers were later rebooked on other flights and AirAsia said its perth engineers were assessing the aircraft.
“The safety of our guests is our utmost priority,” the airline said in a statement. “AirAsia Indonesia apologises for any inconvenience caused.”
The Australian Transport Safety Bureau said it was treating the depressurisation as an incident.
"Though such a descent can be disconcerting, it was standard operating procedure,'' the bureau said. "The aircraft returned to Perth Airport and conducted a normal approach and landing with no reported injuries."
Investigators in Perth will retrieve the aircraft’s cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder and ship them to Canberra. Arrangements will also be made to interview the crew.
This is one of a number of incidents involving AirAsia and sister airline AirAsia X under investigation by the ATSB.
Te most recent included an engine failure in June over Western Australia which left an Airbus A330 shaking “like a washing machine” after what is believed to have been a fan blade failure. The captain on that flight told passengers to say a prayer.
A week later, a second engine failure involving another AirAsia X A330 near the Gold Coast in Queensland was initially blamed by the airline on a suspected bird strike.
However, a subsequent ATSB report described it as an in-flight engine fault.
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