Hardly that. Shouldn’t have happened and scary as hell for those aboard. But hardly a “disaster”.

Evidently nobody was sitting close to the door plug. Had there been someone there and they were unbuckled, there’s an excellent chance they would have exited the aircraft. It also happened at 16,000’ so the differential between cabin altitude and actual altitude wouldn’t have been as great as at cruising altitude. At higher altitudes the event would have been much more violent, and by that I mean people would have been bleeding from places they wouldn’t think they could bleed from. It would have also caused internal injuries for many and likely death for some. At cruising altitude the span of useful consciousness is measured in seconds. If the flight crew doesn’t get their masks on in time, they fall asleep. I don’t know if the 737 has an emergency descent mode. Some aircraft do and the plane will automatically descend to a lower altitude where the crew would have some hope of waking up before running out of fuel. As a pilot of such aircraft you train for such situations, but it’s every pilot’s worst nightmare. The masks in the cockpit are designed to be donned in seconds, but there’s going to be a lot of very chaotic things going on and there’s just no way to train for that.

In 1962, when airlines were allowed to try to set new air speed records. Mine was the last flight to be allowed to try it. The crew of course are trained, but we passengers *did not* put on our oxygen masks. We were thrown, screaming, over the backs of the seats in front of us as the plane dove down to 10,000 feet at a very steep angle. We screamed, but could not hear ourselves or others screaming. I guess because there was no oxygen.

The idea is to get down to a lower altitude as fast as possible. The jets that I fly can safely descend at 10,000' per minute while a normal descent will be no more than about 2,000' per minute. The deck angle will be extreme and certainly most passengers will think the plane is out of control, but the maneuver is standard procedure in such situations.