The first lesson I learned as a pilot is that airplanes are incredibly forgiving beasts. Seriously, you almost have to try to crash them on purpose. This runs counter to conventional beliefs because movies and the media always play up the stewardess being sucked out of the cabin angle, or the gremlin on the wing angle. Learning how to crash-land a plane is one of the most interesting lessons that a begining pilot is taught. Flying is not nearly as spontaneous as one thinks. There is a checklist for everything. My checklists were always on a clipboard that wrapped around my right leg, secured with a velcro strap. If you think that’s kind of silly you should see the volumes of checklists that astronauts have to follow to do anything.
Practicing crash landings is like a dress rehearsal for a performance you never wish to be in. At the last minute you pull up of course, otherwise you have to explain to farmer John why there is a Cessna burning in his field. The closest I ever came to an accident was in fact a landing. I took a friend up for her birthday. While landing, the plane bounced several times, several meters up off the runway. She didn’t realize how badly I had botched it. Never during all my instruction had such a thing happened but having memorized my checklist I was able to recover. That brings me finally to Flight 358. Science Daily reports:
All 297 passengers and 12 crew survived a catastrophic airliner fire Tuesday at Toronto’s international airport, a Canadian airport official said.The official stressed he was quoting “unconfirmed reports.” He said there appeared to be only 14 minor injuries, but could not confirm that one of Air France Flight 358’s pilots had been taken to the hospital
He refused to speculate on the cause of the fire. The airliner after a flight from Paris.
Earlier, flame and smoke were pouring out of the passenger airliner at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport shortly after an accident around 4 p.m. EDT Tuesday.
So how and why did the passengers survive such a burning heap? For the last few months I have been reading the brilliant book, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers. It is essentially a book about dead bodies. Chapter six in the book is titled Beyond the Black Box. It’s an entire chapter that is dedicated to dead bodies involved in airplane crashes. According to interviews in the book, nearly 80 to 85% of plane crashes are potentially survivable because they happen on takeoff and landing, and not high in the sky (more on that in a moment). The number one killer in crash landings (fire) is exacerbated by panic. When faced with imminent death people will scramble like animals toward the doors. People seated next to the window paradoxically have a greater chance of survival because the contents of the overhead bins won’t knock them out. Studies have shown that the single most important factor in determining who will survive and who won’t is gender. Adult men are the most likely to survive, presumably because they push others out of the way and trample them to get to the exit. In listening to interviews of Flight 358 passengers in the next few days I am going to listen to see if that was true in this case. To the credit of these mostly Canadian passengers, all reports thus far say they followed the crews instructions well.
Now, by contrast an explosion in the air is highly unsurvivable. Air India Flight 182 is a good example of this. Not everyone was killed by the bomb when it went off above the Atlantic of course. A good many died when their bodies hit the water. Often when hitting turbulence that’s really bad, I wonder what would happen if the plane cracked in half and I got sucked out. 
Even if you are over water, if you are higher than 500 feet in the air then your body (feet first, which is the optimal position) will strike the surface much higher than 70 mph, which is just about the survivable threshold. At higher speeds than that the most common cause of death is a ripped aorta or a rib cracking and fatally puncturing one of your organs. How do they know all this? Sir Harold Whittingham working on behalf of Britain’s Royal Air Force conducted a study on guinea pigs in the 1954 (by putting them in a vertical catapult and measuring when their lungs ruptured). The investigation was launched after a series of accidents involving the British Comet, the most notable of which occured in Calcutta in 1953.
Also, while I have your attention, check out this classic BBC clip about the Comet starting service to India.
Fascinating stuff, Abhi. And yes, Stiff is quite good.
You could end up on Lost.
Ah, I have always been curious what exactly kills people when planes break up in mid fligh. Explanations like pressure differences and temperature just seem like so much hot air, if you know what I mean. Next time it happens, I will be sure to land feet, first though. And I will thank SM when Science Daily asks me for my story.
I am never flying again after reading this.
That gremlin on the wing thing is phookin scary! I’m spooked man! And I am sitting in a room on the ground floor!
… and as for your landing skills, take heart for this what i heard from a commerical pilot: “after landing, if you can walk away from the plane that’s a good landing; if you can use the plane again, that’s a great landing!”
Abhi, this is off topic, but can you tell me if astronauts are always tethered to their spacecraft or are equipped with a backpack maneuvering unit during a spacewalk? I was told that even if the astronaut is not tethered or is using a backpack maneuvering unit, he will travel at the same velocity as the spacecraft when he steps out.
That’s Newton’s first law of motion, a.k.a. inertia.
Yep, An astronautis always tethered or has an MMU on.
If you are aboard the Shuttle then you are traveling through space with the same velocity (direction and speed) as the shuttle. If you step off, you will contine to travel at the same speed and velocity as the shuttle. Eventually your positions will separate because the shuttle’s atmospheric drag profile (even at those high altitudes) matters and is different than yours. In order to move in space you have to apply thrust along an (x,y,z) coordinate. A series of thrusts will get you to the appropriate location (in this case underneath the shuttle). Alternatively you could use pre-built hand-holds or be placed where you need to by being carried by the shuttle arm.
Hope that explains it 🙂
Yes it does. Thanks.
There was an earlier thread on how the floods brought out the best in Mumbai-kars. Well… here’s TO’s finest for y’all. 🙂 … The evacuation of everyone — more than 300 people — took less than two minutes, with a co-pilot the last to leave the flaming wreckage, airport Fire Chief Mike Figliola said… After escaping, Pajot said, “We ran because it was burning. We walked down the river to the bridge. One lady was carried by a man.” He said the pilot was with them and appeared to be injured. On rainswept Highway 401, Canada’s busiest, which runs parallel to the ravine where the plane halted, drivers suddenly saw what seemed like zombies in a horror movie. “Oh my God, what’s going on?” Yvonne Boland thought as she stopped to help. “Four people, eight people, 12 people streaming up,” she told the Toronto Star. Guy Ledez, a “floating” manager for Budget rental cars at the airport, was driving on airport grounds, parallel to the descending plane. He said he was “pretty sure” he saw lightning strike the aircraft. “There’s all this lightning right on it, then there was smoke and then the plane just disappeared down the ravine,” he told The Associated Press. He said he ran toward the gully and began pulling passengers up out of the mud. “I looked down; there’s just a sea of people trying to get up,” said Ledez, 37. “I had two babies passed to me. There were elderly people who couldn’t get up, so we went down and pulled them up.” When the stream of passengers ended, he said he and another man who had stopped to help them climbed up an emergency escape chute and into the burning plane. Each took an aisle and did a sweep to make sure nobody had been left behind. …
Abhi: I clicked on the link MMU and the picture I saw looked familiar. So I went to your room and there it was on the East wall [2feet X 3 feet]. Hope the mission for the fourth EVA is successful. Your Mom and I are off to China tomorrow and we will have to watch the safe return of the crew next Tuesday over there….Dad
your dad seems really cool, Abhi
abhi, I am just a little bit in awe of you right now. Also, I wish I had never read this post.
I’ve seen Stiff around the bookstores and been tempted to buy it, but there’s too much overlap with work, if you get my drift…..
I’ll suggest it to the residents in my next lecture; they’d probably get a kick out of it.
DesiDancer, Yes he is. 🙂
MD, Thanks MD. Even though it overlaps with work I am sure you will find the book enjoyable. Its wriiten using dark humor.
Here, here on Stiff– it’s a really fast read, MD, because it’s highly entertaining. It also veers off the obvious course a lot (i.e. guinea pigs being hurtled off planes, bullets being shot through gelatin, etc), so there will be plenty in there that won’t overlap.