Rapid descents: aircraft dropping thousands of feet a minute

A typical airliner descent runs at a few thousand feet per minute. A much faster descent can follow a loss of cabin pressure, when the crew takes the aircraft down to air that is safe to breathe, but steep descents are also routine for skydiving aircraft, some military jets and some approaches. This topic collects descents of 4,500 ft per minute or more.

The site needs a high vertical rate that neighboring reports confirm, measured after repeated identical reports are collapsed into one, so a single bad value cannot make a story. A descent can count as an exceptional event, beyond the daily story limit, when the reported rate holds at 7,000 ft per minute or more for at least 30 seconds and four reports, and the altitude itself falls at least 6,000 ft a minute over that time. A jump-plane type descending near a runway loses that status. So does an aircraft that made a separate descent within six hours, unless the descent began at 25,000 ft or higher with the profile of an emergency descent.

The data records how fast the aircraft came down. It cannot show a pressurization problem, a medical emergency or any other reason, so a profile that matches an emergency descent is described as a match and never as proof. Vertical rates also come in two kinds, from pressure and from satellite altitude, and a story says which one it uses.