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I'm a private pilot and fly small single engine aircraft.
As someone mentioned above, airplanes are as complicated as it gets and pilots do not necessarily know the mechanics of the bird. Sure, they can fly it safely, but when the shit hits the fan it is a whole different story. If the emergency is serious, both pilots will be concentrated on keeping everyone alive. However, there might be some emergencies where you have margins, like the Helios flight, and this is where one concentrates on the problem while the other flies the plane.
According to the last info I read on Helios, the official report claimed that the pressurization switch was set to MANUAL instead of AUTO and the cabin was not pressurized. In the B737, the pressurization switch must be checked on startup, before takeoff and after takeoff, so it is highly unlikely that the pilots missed it, but let's go with this version.
After 10,000 ft the air gets too thin to be able to breathe and people in commercial flights rely on pressurization to be able to do so. When passing 9000 ft, an alarm sounded on that Helios flight alerting the crew that there was a problem. The problem is that there isn't an alarm for each system, so only the MASTER CAUTION sounded. This alarm may sound for a number of reasons, so if the cause is not immediately recognized, it is time to hit the books.
The oxygen masks on Helios dropped at about 13,000 ft, but the plane continued to climb to 34,000 ft. This is the greatest mystery of all and quite unexplainable, unless the pilots were already crippled by hypoxia (shortage of oxygen in the blood which causes disorientation, miscoordination, etc.)
So you have two pilots with hypoxia in the cockpit with an alarm going off, neither of them can find immediate apparent causes nor are they aware that they're suffering from hypoxia, the co-pilot starts reading the book and trying to make sense of anything until he passes out. Its a recipe for disaster. If they couldn't dive the plane to a safe altitude (below 10,000 ft) to get oxygen, there's little chance that they were thinking about landing the plane.
Night-time emergencies are even more fucked up because you can't see anything below and on really dark nights, it is hard to fly a plane without an artificial horizon. That being said, it is nearly impossible to pick a safe place to land since you don't know what is below you.
FYI, some time last year, a British Airways 747 from NY to London had an engine failure shortly after takeoff. The pilots called in to their operations center and they were instructed to continue the transoceanic flight with only 3 engines. They adjusted the rudder to compensate for the difference in thrust and flew the whole leg like that. They had to land in some other UK airport because they were running out of fuel since the rudder trim created parasite drag and they needed more power than usual to fly at the same speed.
Any time you fly, it is likely the airplane you board does not have all the systems working, specially on older models. There's a tolerance level and only in severe cases, the plane is tagged as NO-GO. I've heard of pilots flying daytime without artificial horizons which is an absolute suicide if you're caught in the clouds.
If you guys are interested in seeing just how fucked up the airline business is, I suggest you check out Whisky Romeo Zulu and Fuerza Aerea SA. Both are films by an argentinian ex-pilot-turned-filmmaker and he calls out all the crazy things he lived and saw while being a captain of a 737-200 for Aerolíneas Argentinas.
If people only knew...
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