I suspect that seeing the engines come off and the big hole in back of the plane would have clued them in that there was an emergency. I heard one expert say that a fire after such a landing is a near certainty.
Maybe they will play up “leave your stuff” in the next round of safety videos.
But I couldn’t see that through all the smoke…
People’s brains work funny in a crisis. Perfectly sane, logical people do inexplicable things in the immediate aftermath of crashes, fires, assaults, etc.
On a survival level it’s perfectly logical for the brain to default to “gather what’s needed for survival; my bag with my medications and essential belongings, as long as I’m not currently on fire/drowning/missing a major limb”.
Oh, I bet the thought was "I can get out, and it will be really inconvenient for me not to have my laptop, purse, case of YooHoo or whatever. And if only one person did it, it would be no problem. However, I think they all got that it was an emergency. But, like I said, leaving your stuff is mentioned but not emphasized enough.
I actually did a little research on the whole “grabbing your stuff” thing because I’ve frequently heard about it after many sorts of disasters (being a bit of a disaster voyeur).
It’s seems grabbing stuff is a very common reaction to a life-threatening emergency. If there is any time available between Bad Thing Occurring and Need to Leave Now a sizable percentage of people will gather stuff. They don’t always gather useful or valuable stuff, either. Sometimes they just grab the nearest thing and flee with it.
In other words, it’s not really a rational response and probably is not going to be simply reasoned away or discouraged by pre-disaster warnings. One hypothesis bandied about is simply that people are foolish and don’t follow directions. Another one is that it’s a sort of instinctive response from prehistory, where fleeing into the wild without any survival gear at all could be more risky than staying put (gotta have that spear/flint knife/means to make fire/whatever). If it’s the latter simply cautioning people “don’t do that” won’t necessarily work. It will reduce how often it happens but not eliminate it. Going forward it might be better to plan with the assumption that a certain number of people are going to do this no matter what you say.
In some instance it may actually be a rational response - for someone requiring regular doses of life saving medication grabbing a small bag with that could in fact improve their survival. But it’s one thing to grab a small bag and another to attempt to leave with a large rolling suitcase.
And since the Captain wasn’t in a hurry to evacuate, there must have been a lot of time available. I think I would have looked around to see what I could grab that might be useful. 90 seconds is a long time if you are told not to move and are trying to evaluate the situation.
about the spouse (who was on the flight) of the flight attendant who got injured and almost killed when one of the two slides inflated inside the aircraft.
http://news.yahoo.com/asiana-crash-husbands-worst-nightmare-153709705.html
Here’s some additional animation and info about how the animation was created.
Absolutely. Quite a high percentage of people go straight into a numb “not really happening” mode. I remember a report some years after September 11 talking about how many people were casually turning off their computers, gathering stuff, and other trivialities even after the second plane had hit. You would think that most people would be in a “get the hell out of here” state of mind, but that’s not the case, especially when the source of danger is not right in your face.
didn’t read any detail anywhere yet
Foreign Airlines Urged to Use GPS at San Francisco
http://screen.yahoo.com/disaster-accident-breaking-news-foreign-154119826.html
Second SFO Disaster Avoided Seconds Before Crash
“On July 25th, flight EVA28, a Boeing 777 flying from Taiwan to SFO, was on the final approach for runway 28L when they were alerted by ATC that they were only at 600ft above the ground at less than 4NM from the threshold. SFO’s tower directed the flight crew to climb immediately and declare missed approach”
So should I be scared that I’m flying into SFO, or am I OK since I’m not using an Asian airline…
I don’t know if a go-around at 600ft constitutes OMFG DISASTER AVERTED!!!11
No, not a disaster, I’d say the system worked as intended and prevent a possible problem.
Would we even be hearing about this incident if is wasn’t for the previous crash making people more aware of these things?
A colleague of mine once was in a plane that did a last-few-seconds aborted landing at ABQ because someone rolled onto the runway ahead of them when he shouldn’t have. That didn’t even make the local news. I suspect there are lots of “near misses” like that – the system just works well enough that very few of these turn into “non-misses”.
I suspect not. Go-arounds are not especially noteworthy affairs, unless it’s a two-feet-from-the-ground-holy-shit-level affair.
Not even their best version - saw a better one on a recent flight.
Certainly gets your attention.
If you don’t take your stuff the expensive pieces will become “misplaced”.
Saw this, remembered an interesting thread about it, searched for it, and I’m the OP. Heh.
Anyway,
NTSB report. Plus a film of the crash on YouTube.
The NTSB report is out. "Mismanagement by the pilots of Asiana Flight 214, including confusion over whether one of the airliner’s key controls was maintaining airspeed, caused the plane to crash while landing in San Francisco last year, the National Transportation Safety Board concluded Tuesday.
But the board also took the unusual step of faulting the complexity of the Boeing 777’s autothrottle, as well as materials provided by the aircraft maker that fail to make clear under what conditions the automated system doesn’t automatically maintain speed, saying they contributed to the accident."
http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/NTSB-faults-pilot-mismanagment-in-Asiana-flight-5576097.php
AFAIC they contradicted themselves with this statement: The Asiana flight crew “over-relied on automated systems that they did not fully understand,” Hart said.
This isn’t a mid-production change which would confuse pilots like the foot pedal issue with the A300.
This accident was 100% the fault of the crew. The plane was clearly way off the proper flight path and they watched it happen.