United Airlines flight to Rome plunges 26,000 feet in 10 minutes after ‘cabin pressure drops’, forcing plane to return to New Jersey
- The Boeing 777 descended more than 28,000 feet in just 10 minutes
- The United Airlines plane was en route from Newark to Rome
- The airline said this was due to a ‘possible drop in cabin pressure’
A United Airlines flight to Rome with almost 300 people on board plunged more than 8,000 meters in just ten minutes due to a drop in cabin pressure.
Flight details revealed that UAL510, a Boeing 777 traveling from Newark Liberty International Airport to Rome-Fiumicino International Airport, went from an altitude of 37,000 ft to 8,700 ft in just ten minutes on Wednesday evening.
The plane circled twice over Nova Scotia, Canada, at a stable altitude around 10:30 PM before flying back home.
The plane, which was carrying 270 passengers and 14 crew members, flew back to Newark to “accommodate a possible loss of cabin pressure,” a United Airlines spokesperson said.
“The flight landed safely and there was never any loss of cabin pressure,” the spokesperson said.
There was “a possible loss of cabin pressure” during the flight, a United Airlines spokesperson said
Flight data showed the plane circled over Nova Scotia twice before returning to Newark
The Federal Aviation Administration, the agency responsible for regulating flights in the US, also said the plane experienced a “pressurization problem” that forced it to change course.
United Airlines said the travelers on the plane were eventually flown to Italy on another plane.
The chaos in the skies comes as U.S. airlines have criticized the FAA for not having enough staff, leading to hundreds of delayed or canceled flights during a record travel season.
Airlines have faced flight problems after a record US summer season and voluntary suspensions of flights due to air traffic shortages.
They want to add more flights to meet demand, and top airline executives have blasted the FAA for not doing enough to meet this demand.
“In the short to medium term, we need to reduce the number of flights at highly impacted airports as the system cannot accommodate the current number of flights,” Robin Hayes, CEO of JetBlue Airways, said at an industry conference on Tuesday.
“We are selling flights that we know we cannot operate due to ATC issues,” he added.
United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby, who sharply criticized the FAA this summer, said at the conference that air traffic staffing woes were “two decades in the making and will take years to address.”
According to the FAA, commercial airlines recorded 46 close calls between aircraft in July.
Some of the near misses include one on July 2, when a Southwest Airlines flight landing at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport was seconds away from hitting a Delta plane preparing to take off from the same runway.
In San Francisco, two planes taking off almost crashed into a Frontier Airlines plane that had just landed and was waiting to cross the runway.
Another incident near Minden, Louisiana between an American Airlines plane and United Airlines caused the American pilot, flying at more than 500 mph (800 km/h), to pull the plane up 700 feet (220 meters) to avoid a collision.