Pilots Admit the Scariest Things That Happen Inflight

You never really know what is happening inside the cockpit. (Photo: Thinkstock)

When we fly we are putting our lives in the pilots’ hands. Rarely do we realize how close we could come to disaster in the air.

Pilots are finally admitting what happens when they have close calls in the air and how terrifying they truly are. Of course we know flying is statistically very safe, but after reading some of their harrowing tales of near misses, documented in a thread on Reddit, you may think twice about what happens in the cockpit.

The thread is titled: “What’s the closest disaster you’ve averted while on a flight that the passengers had no idea about?”

Related: Confessions of an Airline Pilot — Weirdo Pilots Edition

Engine failure

One poster to the thread admitted he experienced engine failure while at the helm of a small aircraft.

“This was partly self-inflicted and a valuable learning experience…. Just five minutes into the flight he spotted the fuel gauge was at 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 two 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.

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 two magnetos providing electricity to the spark plugs had failed.”

Related: Secrets of the Skies — Flight Attendants and Pilots Tell All

Loss of cabin pressure

“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.

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.

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

The cockpit overheated

One thread came from the son of a commercial aircraft pilot, who recounted the time the cockpit in his dad’s plane overheated.

“Dad retired with 36,000 hours, closest disaster was a cockpit fire. So I got the short story from him…. He was supposed to fly from Orlando to Boston but as he was taking off he noticed that there was a lot of super hot air pouring into the cockpit. What had happened is instead of wiring the engine valve shut like the mechanics were supposed to, they wired the valve wide open. As I understand it, the engine valve usually automatically regulates the amount of hot air that the engine bleeds into the cockpit. However, the wiring they did made it so the maximum amount of hot air was coming in continuously from the engine. He made an emergency landing in Jacksonville and by the time they landed they couldn’t touch the controls, they were using clothing as oven mitts. He said he and his co-pilot were also completely drenched in sweat.”

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