They weren't concerned about it when they decided to fly across a third of the state and overfly a major metro area in the process.
Oh well, I'm out.
They probably were, but were too busy to address it. Or they got new news from the back... “There’s a lot of holes back here...” Hmm, maybe we shouldn’t stress this airframe any more than it’s been stressed today.
You seem very intent on saying they did something wrong. Have you listened to other CVRs during engine failures or read the transcripts? You’re pretty damn busy running the QRH items for just the engine, add a decompression and reports of injuries from the back, you’re going through a lot of pages. It takes time.
It’s not like these recordings and transcripts aren’t available for other flights. Go take a gander at some. Don’t just read the transcribed words, really pay attention to the time tags on the left.
And even with that, they’re thorough but they don’t have a stopping point in them that says, “Call the back and have a long chit chat about a lady hanging out the side of the aircraft.”
They get changed from time to time, too. The Hudson event pointed out that the QRH for dual engine out was written for a high altitude dual engine loss due to volcanic ash. It ran so long that the aircraft would have been in the water ten to fifteen minutes before they finished the checklists and the procedure. (Which is also why they never got to the Ditch button and didn’t close the valve.)
In this case, single engine loss with rapid decompression is certainly a trained thing, with both mandatory memory items, donning of masks, and the resulting difficulties with communication while they’re on, and then takes a significant amount of time to get through the checklist once you’re done from a deadly altitude.
You can pre-empt those checklists, but you’d better have a very good reason. A way better reason than, “Some guy on the Internet isn’t going to like my chosen landing airport.”
And recall, from the recording we have, they didn’t appear to have any notice from the cabin that someone was even injured until about a 20 mile final for Philly.
Like I said, NTSB will whine about that, but when you tie up a couple of FAs getting an injured person O2, finding a Doctor if one is aboard, checking that all pax had their masks on, and maintaining a herd of panicked passenger’s emotions, they really don’t have time to be chit-chatting with the cockpit either.
Keep in mind also that the number of FAs is determined by the evacuation test, not by how many people it takes to manage an in-flight medical emergency on top of a decompression and slam dunk drop with masks dropped. It’s pretty common for the cabin crew to be completely out of resources during an event like that.
Think of how many people it took to slap the hysterical passenger in Airplane!
But seriously, they’re busy. The flight crew is busy putting the aircraft on the ground. There’s quite a bit of time compression, and from the flight crew’s perspective, they’re just flying a crippled jet. Not a crippled jet with a passenger hanging outside, or whatever happened to her.
The insinuation that you’re essentially making is that a human flight crew wouldn’t do everything in their power to help the lady that they could if they knew about it.
Here’s my bet. The cabin crew called and said she was dead on 20 mile final. The flight crew then tactfully asked for an ambulance for someone “injured” over the radio, knowing the press and everyone else would have that audio long before the CVR was redacted for unnecessary items to the investigation, and eventually released.
You don’t say you have dead passengers over the ATC radio.
I suspect she was dead in the decomp and the cabin crew tried like hell to revive her and notified the cockpit they didn’t think she was going to be revived just prior to landing. Since, training is to continue CPR until you hand off to the ambulance crew.
Ever do CPR on someone for that long? You usually have to trade out rescuers. It’s exhausting. Now do it on the floor of an airliner in the aisle or maybe drag the victim if you dare move them to the galley floor. And wonder how trampled the victim will be if you have to order an evac over their body and out that particular set of exits.
Long CPR sessions, ain’t no fun. You do it because until a Doc calls them dead, they’re not dead yet.
Anyway that’s my best guess. People trying to save her life in vain, or she was killed instantly. Either way, the cabin crew didn’t notify the cockpit right away or likely notified them that they were assessing and then got caught up in CPR activities, helping move her, whatever.
You can kinda tell something really bad happened in the cabin. Not a single person shot a cell phone video and was willing to post it. Probably out of respect to the family. Nor have any surfaced. I seriously doubt the airline confiscated any equipment.
And we do have the two idiots further foreword who took selfies. So there were cell phones on board. They were far enough away, they didn’t likely even know someone was dead or dying in back of them.
I hate the cell phone patrol with a passion in emergencies, but there not being a single thing posted from that area of the cabin is a big hint that something looked really bad. The usual narcissists didn’t even dare snap a photo nearby. That bad.