Most plane crashes are ‘survivable’
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First, the good news. “The vast majority of aircraft accidents are survivable, and the majority of people in accidents survive,” says Galea. Since 1988, aircraft — and the seats inside them — must be built to withstand an impact of up to 16G, or g-force up to 16 times the force of gravity. That means, he says, that in most incidents, “it’s possible to survive the trauma of the impact of the crash.”
For instance, he classes the initial Jeju Air incident as survivable — an assumed bird strike, engine loss and belly landing on the runway, without functioning landing gear. “Had it not smashed into the concrete reinforced obstacle at the end of the runway, it’s quite possible the majority, if not everyone, could have survived,” he says.
The Azerbaijan Airlines crash, on the other hand, he classes as a non-survivable accident, and calls it a “miracle” that anyone made it out alive.
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Most aircraft involved in accidents, however, are not — as suspicion is growing over the Azerbaijan crash — shot out of the sky.
And with modern planes built to withstand impacts and slow the spread of fire, Galea puts the chances of surviving a “survivable” accident at at least 90%.
Instead, he says, what makes the difference between life and death in most modern accidents is how fast passengers can evacuate.
Aircraft today must show that they can be evacuated in 90 seconds in order to gain certification. But a theoretical evacuation — practiced with volunteers at the manufacturers’ premises — is very different from the reality of a panicked public onboard a jet that has just crash-landed.
Galea, an evacuation expert, has conducted research for the UK’s Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) looking at the most “survivable” seats on a plane. His landmark research, conducted over several years in the early 2000s, looked at how passengers and crew behaved during a post-crash evacuation, rather than looking at the crashes themselves. By compiling data from 1,917 passengers and 155 crew involved in 105 accidents from 1977 to 1999, his team created a database of human behavior around plane crashes.
His analysis of which exits passengers actually used “shattered many myths about aircraft evacuation,” he says. “Prior to my study, it was believed that passengers tend to use their boarding exit because it was the most familiar, and that passengers tend to go forward. My analysis of the data demonstrated that none of these myths were supported by the evidence.”