I am going to preface this passage by making the following statements to dissuade those who want to attack me for it, for those who want to claim I am saying things I am not.
-I am not a pilot, nor do I claim to be.
-I do not claim to understand all the reasons behind the decisions made today, nor am I pretending to.
-I am providing a first hand account of what transpired and sticking to facts as a passenger on this flight.
-While I have done some very limited VFR flying myself, I take a great interest in aviation. I have nearly 2.5 million BIS miles across nearly 100 countries on this beautiful planet and I take great interest in aviation. I have studied it in my free time, I watch charts, study winds, flight routes, ATC vectors, etc. I am a really student of this craft as I spend so much of my life up in the air. For nearly 30 years I have always felt that every airline I have been on, including and especially DL, at the end of the day will always make the right decisions when it comes to passenger safety. Ive never felt DL has made a decision without the upmost in passenger safety at the forefront. Today however, I may have experienced my first doubt in this, even if they arent totally to blame.
With all of this said, I will begin my story. I was a passenger onboard this flight today. It was hot and sunny as it normally is in PUJ this time of year. As a consequence, there will often be convective storms that build over the island throughout the day. None of this is unusual. During boarding and while on my computer looking at the maps, I noticed a rather large, nasty convective cell had formed directly Northwest of the airfield. I checked all arriving flights manually via flightradar which allows you to see the path of all arriving and departing aircraft, and noticed that most of the arrivals were vectoring slightly north, and the departures (thankfully) were all vectoring to the East and then turning North to bypass the weather. A company DL PUJ-MSP flight that took off a few minutes before ours followed this path, along with a number of other AA and other aircraft heading up the East Coast. I thought for sure we would follow suit. They all easily and without any effort bypassed the weather and flew in the clear skies that surrounded the airfield in all directions except North West.
We headed down the runway and were soon airborne. Not thinking much I put on my headphones, reclined my seat, and started a movie. I couldn’t help notice however that we made a SOUTHBOUND turn instead of following the Northbound tracks of most of the other departing aircraft. I believe there was also 1 AA flight that did the same during this period. Knowing what I knew in my head about the routing, I became a little confused as I knew this meant we would finish our turn facing the cell. Again, always assuming pilots will avoid flying directly into convective thunderstorms, especially with clear skies on all other sides, I figured he would fly south along the island and then make a northward turn once he passed the weather. This was inevitably not what transpired. I could tell that we had now turned, DIRECTLY, and I do mean directly, into the storm. As we began the climb I saw nothing but dark, dark clouds ahead and I mentioned to my seatmate that this was going to get nasty. What followed was easily tied, if not the single nastiest, most unpleasant turbulence I have ever experienced. We were throw around, slamming up and down, people screaming. We were struck by lightning enough times that a burning metallic smell was present in the cabin (I have been struck by lighting before and sometimes this metallic smell of the electric discharge does fill the cabin but while alarming it is "safe"). It was so bad people held each other, the flight attendants faces looked panicked. It did feel like during the worst of it he tried to make some turns that weren't scheduled to get out of it but it was far too late. You can see if you look on the flight track a strange "S" shape but it didnt do very much.
About 5 minutes later we finally cleared the cell, which was a towering cloud easily 35k+ in elevation. Everyone was visibly shaken. The lady in front of me, clearly on the border of a panic attack made eye contact with me and I smiled at her and said " I have no idea why, but they just flew directly into a thunderstorm with no attempt to vector around it. We should be ok now". The rest of the flight was uneventful. Here is what I can tell you:
-The lead FA and I spoke later in the flight as I was waiting to go to the restroom and she told me that "That was 1st or 2nd worst in my career, thats enough to make me call off work tomorrow" and "we were never told to expect this, it caught all of us off guard" and "I went in the cockpit mid-flight the pilot said "The ATC routed us directly into that storm". These are direct quotes, not paraphrases.
-When we reached cruising the pilot made NO mention of this. No attempt to calm passengers. No attempt to explain it. No attempt at an apology or explanation was offered. In fact the co-pilot made a 10 second announcement about cruising altitude and arrival time and that was the last we heard from them.
-My seatmate texted her sister who happened to be on the MSP flight and she reported smooth sailing and no bumps or weather on departure.
-I spoke with another pilot not on this flight in line for Global Entry and when I mentioned this southbound turn out of PUJ she was shocked as even that is unusual.
In summary, I do not claim to understand all the variables at play here, a pilots last decision is after all supposed to be the safety of his passengers. If ATC vectors you into a storm, you ask to go around it. He chose to blame this on ATC, at least internally from what I was told. I find it difficult to believe that in an uncrowded airspace, where there were no other aircraft around, and when most of the other aircraft heading up to east coast took a better route, this is not some shared blame on the flight crew. I also feel that flying knowingly DIRECTLY into a convective cell is not a safe decision, and one that should not have been made.
This brings up memories of the DL Flight out of Milan that also flew directly into a convective cell but this one had hail and it damaged the aircraft-causing it to divert to Rome.In the end, I do not claim to know exactly why these decisions were made, but I cannot believe there were not better alternatives. Again in 2.5 million miles of BIS flying, this was a first.
That Milan story is here:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...y-landing.html
And was discussed on flyertalk Here:
DAL185 Diversion