Originally Posted by
Panic Stations
It's very difficult to judge an aircrafts attitude from the passenger cabin and almost impossible in instrument flying conditions. On the aircraft type in question you don't really get a 'very termporary failure' of an engine. It either goes 'bang' very loudly or it just runs down and doesn't start again. Either way, even with some fairly gross mishandling it's extremely unlikely that the aircraft would ever reach 45 degrees of bank, let alone 60. Even a significant wake turbulence encounter rarely pushes an aircraft of that size more than 15 degrees from level. I.m sure it felt like a lot of bank and the aircraft may have rolled rapidly in wind but I'd be extremely surprised if it ever got beyond a very routine 30 degrees of bank.
Even to my non-expert perspective, it still felt like 45-60 degrees. Only going on schoolboy protractor measurements, rather than being there in the cockpit. The muffled scream from the galley, immediately in front of me, might help support the evidence that it is not an ordinary event. Can only add my own experience, which is that I've never been through anything like this -- and after some of the bumpy conditions experienced above Indonesia, perhaps I should be used to it (but again, these were nothing like what I experienced yesterday).