Air China will take a “zero tolerance” approach to its investigation of a first officer’s apparently bungled attempt to sneak an in-flight vape aboard one of its Boeing 737s last Tuesday. The FO is reported to have meant to shut off the air recycling system aboard the aircraft while it was at cruise to cover his tracks. Instead, he killed the air conditioning and that triggered a pressurization alarm that released the cabin oxygen masks and prompted an emergency descent. Once the cockpit crew figured out what happened, the switches were moved to their appropriate positions and the Boeing happily inflated itself again. That’s where the pilots may have made their biggest mistake, however
With the masks still dangling from the overhead consoles, they climbed back to their assigned altitude and continued to their destination of Dalian from Hong Kong. But those masks, once activated, use a chemical reaction to generate oxygen for about 15 minutes, normally plenty of time to get an airliner down to breathable air in a pressurization emergency. That means the crew elected to carry on the flight without at least some of the mostly full aircraft’s emergency oxygen supply, a serious breach of the regs and likely to involve some government investigation. There were 153 passengers and nine crew aboard.
