What Were the Symptoms of an Altitude Panic Attack?

We had just flown out of Denver and were descending into San Francisco when the "Pap" sounded. (heading into San Francisco I had been reading online about the evil karma that was supposedly due to my having dropped in altitude.) Suddenly, we heard a sound like a bomb going off and we let out a scream and saw smoke coming out of the engine. Then a bit later we heard a small crash and saw debris flying through the air. So this whole sequence jolted us up off our feet and we slowed down to make an evasive turn while staying altitude. That is when I really lost my cool.


The descent was slow but steady and the more I worried about all the oxygen masks for the stewardesses, the more tense I got. I'm sure if I'd known that we were supposed to put on oxygen masks at high altitude that I would have made a point of doing so but I didn't know. And this high altitude thing is when my blood pressure really started to rise. I remember thinking to myself that "Why am I even bothering to go on this flight? This is insanity."

Well, I'm sure you don't need a calculator to figure out how high I fell. If I stayed within the safety of the cabin it should have been enough, but as luck would have it I was dropped by a large wingspan of the plane which was flying much lower than we were. A lot of people get seasick when they are dropping in altitude and especially when they are flying at 30,000 feet. So my sense of reality was upset. I was in pretty bad shape physically and now I had to deal with my mental state of being so high in the sky.

I landed luckily and it was actually a very easy landing. I climbed out of the plane with a lot of help from passengers who wanted to help me to walk off the plane. Luckily I could make it to the ground without any further medical complications. I was able to walk away after walking about two miles and then realized that I wasn't falling at all.

I'm still alive! I figured this out after the flight was over. When we started dropping in altitude and my senses became fuzzy I said to myself, "This is not good, this is not good." I immediately asked my passenger beside me, "Are you OK?" She said she was fine, but was having some difficulty breathing. It turns out that I was not too far from a medical emergency and we had all gotten caught up in the descending air rush.

The next thing I noticed was the absolute terror that everyone around me was experiencing. My ears were ringing, my hands were sweaty and I was beginning to get vertigo. Everyone seemed to be in complete and total confusion. I didn't really think much of it at first, but as it grew later I began to realize that this was no ordinary panic attack and I had definitely been thrown out of the plane by my own passengers.

The next thing I thought of was getting back into the air and making a turn. Everyone on the ground was telling us to descend immediately and we decided to try to follow them. We reached the point where we were so low that the temperature outside was freezing. It was extremely cold in our plane and we wanted to get out of there as soon as possible. I knew that my oxygen mask would not hold out long, and I was wet and slippery from the carbon monoxide that was filling up my cabin.


I began to shake uncontrollably and the rest of the passengers began to shiver too. Suddenly I became aware that there was a loud banging noise and I began to gasp for air. I looked up and saw that the ceiling of the plane had caved in and was hitting the roof of the plane right above our heads. It was extremely loud and it sounded like something was crashing into the plane. We all started to panic and suddenly a stewardess came over the radio and said that we were getting a report of multiple injuries and one passenger had just lost his arm. As it happened I was able to say "what does that mean" and she replied "you're rolling out of altitude don't worry".