Heather du Plessis-Allan: What happened yesterday is probably my worst nightmare

Author: Heather du Plessis-Allan,
Publish Date: Tue, 12 Mar 2024, 5:06PM

I'll tell you what, what happened with that Latam flight yesterday is probably my worst nightmare.

Weirdly, this has gotten worse since I've had a child, I think that maybe you're more worried about your own mortality- but every time since I've gotten on a flight, at some point between getting on the flight and the flight starting to take off, before it's fully airborne, I start to think about how mind-bending it is that a piece of metal that heavy can somehow stay in the air.

At all, never mind the journey of the flight. And then I have to immediately stop thinking about it, because that just freaks me out way too much. I can't, I'm not smart enough to understand how this all works.

So yesterday is my worst nightmare, because that's the thing I think about every single time I get on the flight.

What makes it even more freaky is that at this point, it does not seem to have been caused by turbulence. It sounds like the plane's technology just stopped working.

One of the passengers says that when the plane landed, the pilot came down the back and when the passenger asked what had happened, the pilot said- my gage has just blanked out, I lost all of my ability to fly the plane.

We got a text on the show not long after it had happened telling us- it's not air turbulence, it was caused by a problem with the plane. Do not contact me.

And Latam, in its own statement, is not talking about turbulence. Yesterday, it referred to the incident as a 'technical event'. And then today, it updated the statement to basically call it a 'strong shake'.

Now, we're probably not going to know what actually happened until after the investigations- and there are multiple investigations already, by the looks of things.

Chile civil aviation bodies have sent someone to investigate, our transport accident investigation commission is considering investigating, and Boeing is investigating as well.

And speaking of Boeing, it's not a good time to be Boeing, is it? Because a couple of months ago, the door blew off the Alaskan Airlines plane, now you've got this- and back in 2018, 2019, those fatal crashes made huge headlines around the world.

But back to yesterday. If it pans out to be true that the plane had simply stopped working- and this is not altogether crazy, because that is what happened with QF72 back in 2008.

Remember that one? Where the automation on the plane basically went nuts a couple of times and caused the plane to nosedive dramatically? And the pilots had no control whatsoever, they thought they were going to die.

So it's not altogether crazy for that to happen. If it does work out that this is what has happened, isn't that absolutely the worst imaginable thing that could happen on a flight?

I mean, if a pilot falls asleep, you can wake him up. If a door blows out, strap yourselves in and put the oxygen on.

But if the computer stops working? Oh no, worst nightmare.

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