When it comes to mass transit, fewer things are safer than a commercial airline, but that doesn’t mean some scary incidents don’t happen. Pilots opened up on a Reddit thread where they shared stories of near misses their passengers never knew about.
“ATC (air traffic control) gave my plane clearance to take off on runway 35 (north) at airport GFK while simultaneously allowing for a similar aircraft to depart from runway 26 (west),” wrote one user. “These runways cross one another, we almost collided at 500 AGL (above ground level). The other aircraft was so close I could make out the expression on the pilot’s face.”
Another person said, “My mom is a flight attendant and has been since the early 1970s. She was on a flight home last month, and as they touched down, the entire window on the co-pilot’s side of the flight deck popped out from its frame and fell away. Luckily they remained calm and neither pilot was injured.”
One of the scariest stories posted was from a pilot who experienced a loss of electrical power, something that’s never supposed to happen. “Flying into a high elevation port in Asia 23,000 feet on descent had a TOTAL loss of electrical power. All screens went dark including standby instruments and emergency lighting. To put this into perspective, Airbus designed this aircraft with three electrical generators in addition to power supplied by batteries and the emergency generator,” the user wrote. “It is designed NEVER to be without electrical power even if BOTH the engines failed, you ran completely out of fuel and the auxiliary power unit is in operative. It’s a scenario pilots don’t even train for because it’s never suppose to happen.”
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