I’m looking at a list of some plane crashes and I’m seeing a lot of stuff like 284 dead, 0 survivors or 199 dead, 5 survivors and so forth. It seems like, when a plane crashes, you’re basically a goner.
What I’m wondering is, at what point during the crash does most of the dying happen? Is it the crashing part, or is it the bursting into flames part? Or is it somewhere in-between, or after?
I don’t have an answer, but I want to help you ward off a potential nitpick-fest. I think you probably mean “at what point are most mortal injuries sustained” (death isn’t necessarily instantaneous - but I think you’re asking when people change from being potential survivors, to being goners)
Depends on how the crash unfolds, obviously. If the plane depressurizes at a high enough altitude, you may die of oxygen starvation while still in the air. (I know, I know, oxygen masks. But the events which cause depressurisation may also render the oxygen lines inoperable.) If there’s an explosion in the air, obviously the explosion may kill you. If the plane flies into the ground (and you’re not already dead) the impact will likely kill you. Only if the plane attempts some kind of landing with some degree of success are you likely to survive long enough to be killed in a post-landing fire.
Most people die either in the hitting the ground part of the crash, or in the burning part of the crash immediately after hitting the ground.
QtM, who was one of two survivors of a plane crash, many years ago. (There were only two of us in the plane. Even so, we spent a long time in the hospital.)
In her memoir, former NBC reporter Linda Ellerbee recalled a news conference where one reporter asked more and more insistency what exactly killed the passengers in a plane crash. Finally the coroner sighed and said, “Let me put it this way. The plane stopped and the people didn’t.”
Whereas a factual answer was requested, I have an admittedly WAG speculation to offer:
In at least some plane crashes – to-wit, those spectacular ones where a plane full of 400 people plunges from the sky and crashes at terminal velocity, creating a huge crater and fireball and flinging fragments of plane and people for a quarter mile all around: I would very much suspect that the transition from “alive-and-healthy” to “smithereens” happens very very quickly, upon the first contact of plane with ground. So quickly, I suspect, that it happens faster than a nerve impulse can travel from one synapse to the next. If that is correct, then the passengers-turned-smithereens will die, very literally, without ever feeling a thing. The ensuing fireball may look like a horrifying way to die, but the passengers are long gone before that even begins.
These sorts of crashes are horrifying and make spectacular visual spectacles due to the big fireball (although not often captured in progress on film), with huge fatality counts (but not so much body counts, they being mostly smithereens). Usually, you see after-the-fact photos of crater and charred plane fragments. But I suspect that the most spectacular crashes are likely also the most painless and benign from the non-existent point-of-view of the smithereens.
It’s very different if, say, a plane nicks the top of a mountain or tree and tumbles end-over-end before coming to rest, or any of the other non-clean-crash scenarios suggested above. For example, in a grotesque crash in Cerritos (Ca) a few years ago, a small plane collided with a large plane on a landing approach. The plane broke up, spilling luggage, seats, and passengers out of the sky over a residential city block or two (ETA: and splattering several people on the ground too). Finally, the plane crashed messily, totally razing an entire residential block.
ETA: Cerritos crash was in 1986. Google “Cerritos airplane crash” for lots of gruesome stories.
I have seen various reports over the years (most of which I don’t have bookmarked and would have to google for, sorry) saying that somewhere between 70-90% of airplane crashes are survivable for at least some, in not all, occupants on board…which doesn’t mean that these passengers do survive - the circumstances are considered to be technically survivable, with appropriate safety systems in place. Naturally, it is the goal of the safety industry (ISASI, ICAO, NTSB/TSB, etc) to maximize survivability, but costs and practicalities in the industry prevent this to some extent.
Offhand, here is a report from 1996 that states that about 90% of crashes are survivable or technically survivable. Here is a reportregarding human tolerance to forces and crash survivability.
The first report says this:
I can try and dig up more, but right now I’m pretty tired and I don’t have much already bookmarked.
There have been a few threads in the recent past, such as this one. where the airline pilot Dopers argued pretty strongly against that point of view.
There needs to be an awareness of what terms are being used and what they are being understood to mean.
I can’t speak for LSLGuy, but I presume he’s thinking of the various events that, as a pilot, he’d report as an accident, not just the fiery-ball-of-crashing-into-mountains kind of events. The industry and the average passenger are thinking of different things, I wager.
The thing is, when lay people think of aircraft accidents, they think of things like Air France 447, or TWA 800 - cases where the plane exploded or crashed into the ocean or a mountain at top speed. Those are pretty much not survivable, by anyone on board (the one child who survived the Yemenia Airlines crash is one hell of an exception!)
But when we look at statistics, most agencies and airlines are using something like the ICAO annex 13 definition of accidents, and most of those accidents are survivable - because they have pilot/crew actions and passenger behaviour that mitigates the damage or involve substantial damage to the plane without risking lives (in the immediate circumstances - obviously the damage is statistically a risk to lives, but in a given event nothing happened), or involve only a single victim or whatever.
ICAO 13 definition of an accident:
So when survivable or technically survivable accidents occur, they take into account all the numbers of things like gear-up landings in which no one gets hurt and which some or all passengers might not even realize is happening until after they disembark. Note that even a typical engine failure isn’t even considered to be an accident - it’s an incident.
So, if the OP is thinking of crashes like AF447, then very few lead to survivors and death is usually on impact or shortly after in the post-impact fire. If the OP is thinking of the industry-wide definition of “accident”, then most do, in fact, lead to survivors and any deaths caused can be due to any number of things.
not sure on the rest of the stats from beyond 2000, but this:
Out of the collective 53,487 people involved in plane crashes in the U.S. from 1983 to 2000, 51,207 survived.
from: this.
(just contributing to that 96% survivability stat).
It’s been known for some time that in general, the people sitting in the back of the plane have the highest chance of survival. After all, since the plane is moving forward, the nose tends to hit first. 
In addition, there seems to be a consensus that if you survive the impact, the first 90 seconds on the ground are the most survivable.
So it appears that either impact or fire kills the most people.
Plane crashes are a lot more survivable than you think. Not the most scholarly source, but it’s clear that your assumption that “when you’re in a plane crash, you’re definitely a goner” isn’t really true. Previous posters have pointed out more reliable statistics to this effect. For obvious reasons only the most catastrophic (Hundreds dead, no survivors) or miraculous (US Airways 1549 ditching in the Hudson, no fatalities) tend to make the news (or stay in the news), and that is likely skewing your perception of what a plane crash is like. Here’s an example of a crash just a few months ago with 0 deaths and 80 survivors. The plane crash-landed, rolled over, and caught on fire.
Having said that, crashes that involve hitting the ground hard enough to immediately disintegrate the plane (flying into a cliff, diving/falling into the ground after breaking up at altitude, 9/11-type incidents) are rare compared to those that could be looked at as extremely rough landings. In the former type, the sudden deceleration would be the most likely cause of death. In the latter, deceleration would be much less, but the risk posed by fire much greater.
Well, that Google led me to the 1978 PSA Flight 182 crash in San Diego, and then to one particularly lengthy local San Diego blog filled with comments from eyewitnesses and others. Wow…gruesome doesn’t begin to cover it. Apparently at least one eyewitness ended up in a mental institution. Seek it out at your own risk (it’s linked to the crash’s Wikipedia page).
Apparently Faces of Death included news footage of the PSA crash and the aftermath. I’ve made it through my 30some years of my life without seeing that and hope to keep it that way.
There was a comedian once talking about seatbelts in cars. He said
"Grandpa didn’t like seat belts. He used to say, if I’m ever in a crash I want to be thrown clear! Maybe instead of a seatbelt light, cars should have a mechanized seat back that whacks your head against the windshield a few times. Have you ever noticed that in an airplane, where it doesn’t matter if you wear a seatbelt or not, everyone does up their belt? Nobody wants to be ‘thrown clear’ in a plane crash. "
IIRC there was a Quincy episode many many years ago where the airline industry got a gag order against him when he (LA coroner) found that the airline seats were not usually adequately bolted down, and in an accident typically they all came loose, the major cause of trauma and death. not sure how true or current this is.
On of the details I read on the search for MIA in Vietnam - pilots who died from a plane crash, plunging into the ground, they could tell because generally the sides of their boots blew out. Humans are like giant water balloons, and when our skeleton stops our fluids don’t.
As mentioned above, there are 2 types of crashes. One is “plunge to the ground” and with an impact of 500mph or more, not much will let you survive. Typically this is either failure at altitude, or a serious failure during takeoff or landing from a height. If a large plane stalls at 1000 feet or more, it will nose down and plunge. Usually, the engines are on full trying to recover, not helping the impact situation. The other option is controlled descent but poor landing (think Captain Tully, engine out). Either control is a problem or the landing site is not ideal. However, the plane may land at 150mph or less and shed speed along with parts. A final crash of 100mph or less should be survivable; the reason the back is safest, it is less likely to be near the fuel tanks and any fire, and may benefit from the frontal parts as a crumple zone.
Not to take this into the even more macabre, but I heard that, if you are blown out of a plane at “cruising speed”, the wind tears your body apart. Is this true, or just a scary campfire story?
J.
p.s., by “cruising speed”, I mean full normal speed which is what, like 450 - 600 MPH?
People landed basically intact in their seats in Lockerbie, Scotland after the Pan Am 103 bombing, so, generally no. Apparently their clothes were blown off though.
Unlikely nowadays unless an airline is cheating/not properly maintaining/flat out flaunting airworthiness regulations.
Here are the Transport Canada CARS for Transport Category Aircraft(which are nearly word-for-word identical to the US FARs, but are on a better to search website). It’s a bit of a mess to wade through it all, but the rules in place are such that seats shouldn’t be able to come loose under some multiple of the expected maximum forces/loads an aircraft is expected to experience.
Chapters 551 and 571 also have something to say on seat design.
Basically, if seats come loose in a crash, it’s a major cause for concern in an investigation and recommendations are usually made to modify the seat/aircraft/regulations in order to avoid it in the future.
You might like to read up about British Airways flight 5390- in which the plane’s captain spent about 20 minutes being buffeted against the outside of a BAC 111 and lived to not only tell the tale, but fly again (seems he still pilots for easyJet). He suffered from frostbite and exhaustion, as well as bruising and some broken bones. It’s a remarkable story and it marks a rather gruesome data point in knowing just what the human body can handle. The crew of the aircraft believed the pilot to be dead and only held on for fear of sending him into one of the plane’s engines, which would be a much more serious emergency for the rest of the plane.
Amazing story, really. Also, one of the pdfs I linked to earlier discusses the loads and forces that humans can endure. I haven’t had the chance to read it yet, but it might interest you.
This thread has reminded me that the term ‘plane crash’ can encompass a great range of incidents. My mind always turns to the disasters, but just like cars, there’s a huge range of what constitutes a ‘crash’.
in case no one posted it, this:
there’s a graph of accidents and fatalities by phase of flight.
i do believe this is exactly what the OP was asking for…?
Mythbusters did an episode on this once. They were basically saying that the fire after the crash is what kills most people. The seats and the plane interiors are designed well enough that the crash itself is surprisingly survivable. But you’d better be able to exit the plane before it catches fire.