A Delta Air Lines passenger frantically tried to connect to WiFi during a rapid emergency descent so they could send out final messages to loved ones.
The traveler, who was aboard Delta Flight 2311 from Los Angeles to Salt Lake City on Sept. 6, recounted the terrifying ordeal in a Reddit post after the Boeing 737 plunged roughly 27,000 feet in about 10 minutes. The flight carried 174 passengers and six crew members when a pressurization issue triggered oxygen masks to deploy throughout the cabin.
“I was frantically trying to see if I could get on WiFi because I didn’t know if I was going to have to be sending out ‘I love you’ texts,” the passenger wrote on Reddit.
The traveler had been asleep when the emergency began, according to the Reddit account. A fiancé alerted them to the unfolding crisis, but disorientation slowed their reaction.
“It took me another second of ‘Is this real or am I dreaming?’ before getting our masks on,” the traveler wrote.
The scariest element for this passenger was not the violent descent itself but the information vacuum inside the cabin. Flight attendants attempted to communicate through their own oxygen masks, leaving announcements garbled and unintelligible.
“The scariest part wasn’t even the descent — it was not knowing what was going on,” the passenger wrote on Reddit. “Flight attendants were trying to make announcements with their masks on, and it was almost impossible to hear them.”
Air traffic control recordings captured the pilots’ calm urgency as they coordinated the emergency maneuver. “Delta 2311 currently [in] rapid descent. We’d like to get down to 9,000, and we’re direct [to] Las Vegas,” a pilot said, according to reports. When a controller asked, “Is the oxygen deployed?” the pilot responded simply, “Affirmative.”
The crew diverted to Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas, where the aircraft landed without incident and passengers deplaned normally. Delta arranged a replacement aircraft to complete the journey to Salt Lake City.
Matthew “Whiz” Buckley, a retired US Navy F/A-18 fighter pilot from Florida with nearly four decades of flying experience, said pressurization failures of this nature are extraordinarily uncommon in American airspace. He said that pilots in such scenarios must identify the nearest suitable airfield with adequate runway length and get the aircraft down without delay.
“In a case such as the Delta one,” Buckley said, “to land as soon as practical — meaning, what’s the closest airfield with a nice, long, suitable runway where we can get this thing on the ground safely.”
Buckley described the pressurization occurrence as “an extremely rare issue” in the United States.
The Reddit post attracted responses from other travelers who had endured similar emergencies. One commenter described a previous Delta flight that descended from approximately 34,000 feet to 10,000 feet while oxygen masks were in use, noting that “the several minutes of rapid descent … [were] pretty jarring until the captain finally came on the mic once we were at a safe altitude.” That passenger recalled the cabin falling silent as travelers focused on breathing through their masks.
Delta issued a statement defending the crew’s actions throughout the incident. “As safety comes before everything else at Delta, the flight crew of Delta flight 2311 LAX-SLC followed their training and procedures to safely bring the aircraft to optimal altitude when an unexpected pressurization issue occurred,” a spokesperson said. The airline also expressed regret to those affected: “Delta sincerely apologizes to our customers for their experience and thanks our flight crews and other support teams on the ground for their professionalism.”