Count the Rows to the Exits
A plane crash in Colombia has killed at least 75 people including most of one of Brazil’s top football teams, leaving just six survivors.
While the investigation may take some time to reveal the factors behind the accident, the distressingly high – but not total – number of fatalities raises the question of how some people are able to survive such a devastating disaster.
Here Graham Braithwaite, Director of Transport Systems, Professor of Safety and Accident Investigation, Cranfield University, writing in The Conversation, explains how some people live to tell the tale.
Aircraft accidents, especially those involving jet aircraft, are increasingly rare. According to the International Air Transport Association, 2015 saw one accident for every 3.1million flights. That’s a spectacular achievement for an industry that is not much more than a century old and which involves transporting people at such high speeds in what can be challenging environments.
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But when an accident does occur, what is it that determines that some passengers survive when many others on the same flight do not?
The first factor is whether an accident is deemed ‘survivable’ at all. While it may seem like a simple definition, there are actually ‘unsurvivable’ accidents where people beat the odds. Unsurvivable accidents tend to be those where there is either a catastrophic loss of control or where the impact is at high velocity.
The Air France aircraft that crashed into the Atlantic in 2009 was a ‘loss of control in flight’ accident which no one could have survived because of the heavy impact with the sea. In contrast, while the loss of all hydraulic systems aboard a United Airlines DC10 in 1989 should have resulted in the total loss of the aircraft, the heroic actions of the crew to steer the aircraft using only the thrust of the engines led to 185 survivors out of the 296 on board.
Accidents that happen in the cruise phase of flight, such as those involving a ‘controlled flight into terrain’ tend to be less survivable. Such accidents happen without the crew being aware of a problem, so occur at high speed and without the cabin or its passengers being prepared for an accident.
In these cases, survivors tend to be rare and the reasons behind their survival can be as random as whether they were thrown clear or were perhaps caught by a tree.
This was the case when there were only four survivors of a 1985 accident involving a JAL Boeing 747, which killed 520 other people when the plane hit a mountainside following the separation of the aircraft’s tail.
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