In the history of commercial aviation, have any passengers EVER been saved by those flotation devices you find in the seat backs of planes?
A commercial jet crashed in the ocean off a beach a few years back. It had been hijacked, and the hijackers wouldn’t believe the pilot when he said they were almost out of gas. Somewhere around 100 people swam to safety after it crashed, probably with the use of their flotation devices.
A few years before that, a jet skidded off a runway and wound up in the frozen Potomac. There was a lot of dramatic TV footage from that, showing passengers clinging to flotation devices and waiting to be pulled from the water by helicopter.
There are doubtless dozens of small commuter accidents in places where there is a lot of overwater flying, like Hawaii and Bermuda. A lot of those will be in water.
Footage of that crash can be found here. It is the only incidence of a commericial passenger jet crashing in water and anybody surviving.
For planes with propellers, I can’t find any actual figures, sorry.