The story of the Southwest plane with the engine explosion has been widely misreported.

There was no uncontrolled descent from 35,000 to 10,000 feet. The plane was out of pilot control (and then, depends on how you define it) only for a few seconds even though the engine did in fact explode. It is standard operating procedure when there is a depressurization event at high altitude to descend as quickly as airframe and conditions allow to 10,000 feet or below.

Why? It’s because 35,0000 feet is in the death zone. At that altitude, most people die in minutes.

When the plane began to depressurize because of cabin breech, the pilot would’ve been aware of this and hauled ass to an altitude below the death zone. Again, not an uncontrolled descent.

The NYT gets it wrong.

Oxygen masks dropped down and the plane plunged thousands of feet in a minute.

Other than the initial steep bank (which would’ve been a few hundred feet of descent due to the physics of how that works), there was no “plunging.”

This CNN article gets it mostly right.

The plane was pitched at an angle of more than 40 degrees for a few unnerving seconds before it leveled out and began an emergency descent, National Transportation Safety Board Chairman Robert Sumwalt told reporters Wednesday in Philadelphia.

I was not surprised to read that the pilot, Tammie Jo Shults, was a military veteran and a total badass. I’m betting that most non-vets would’ve lost that plane as you just don’t get the experience outside the military to handle things like this, in any context.