I vote for water over land, by a huge margin, unless we’re talking about ditching in the North Atlantic, where everyone will die even if the plane comes through in perfect shape.
The biggest factor is fire. Fire is the big killer in otherwise survivable crashes. Take that Ethopian ditching - that was one of hte worst ditching attempts in airline history, because an idiotic terrorist decided at the last minute that he could fly the plane better than the pilot, and clipped a wing into the water while the plane was still well up in the air. Even so, a lot of people survived that. If that crash had been on land, there would have been a huge cartwheel and a gigantic fireball. The Sioux-city crash, for instance, was much less violent, but the plane still wound up cartwheeling and a lot of people were killed.
So, if I had the choice between landing in shallow water near a tropical beach, or landing in an open green space on land itself, I’d take the water.
I think the people in the Ethiopian ditching just got lucky, though. Fires, I suspect, are just as common in water crashes as in land crashes, reason being that jet fuel floats, and only requires something reasonably hot, such as a turning engine, to ignite.
I don’t know about that. I’ve seen a lot of water ditchings and crashes from footage of aircraft carrier accidents and such. I’ve never seen a plane in the water burn.
The only real advantage a controlled emergency water landing has compared to land is that water is flat and smooth, i.e. no hills or buildings.
However, if you survive the landing impact, water has the huge disadvantage of, um, drowning you and/or making you freeze to death long before rescue forces arrive (which can often be awhile). And even if they arrive immediately water makes rescue about 1000 times more difficult. You know those drawings you see on the plane’s safety cards? The ones showing the plane coming to rest in one piece and floating on top of the water, and the flight attendents getting out & inflating rafts and people climbing out the exits and getting into them? Complete nonsense. Watch the scene in the film Cast Away for a simulation of what a water landing would be like.
I would say that any reasonably flat terrain is always preferable to ditching at sea.
According to this site, there have only been three recorded water ditchings of airliners.
October 1963; Aeroflot Tu124; Leningrad, USSR - The airplane ran out of fuel and ditched on the Neva river. The airplane remained floating, and was eventually towed to shore. All 52 passengers and crew survived.
2 May 1970; ALM DC9-33CF; near St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands - Aircraft ran out of fuel and ditched in the ocean. It stayed floating for four or five minutes, then sank in 1 mile deep water. 22 of the 57 passengers were killed, but the majority survived.
23 November 1996; Ethiopian Airlines 767-200ER; near Moroni, Comoros Islands - This is the one we’ve been talking about. Airplane cartwheeled after botched ditching attempt. 10 of the 12 crew members and 117 of the 160 passengers were killed. The fuselage actually broke in half while it was cartwheeling, ejecting debris and people as it crashed.
So, ditchings are eminently survivable. Even bad ones.
Given the fact that what I’ll call “instant decision crash landings” happen (and 90% of the time by the time you may reach a decision point it’s already too late), if you are airborne and a problem develops inflight, can’t you dump fuel?
I thought I’ve heard about this both in and out of Hollywood. IIRC, a plane dumped fuel over Tempe, AZ but it never touched the ground because it vaporized 3000’ from the aircraft? Wouldn’t this help to rule out a lot of fire casualties?
If it’s true, I’d rather crash over land for the same reason as mentioned before: easier to survive.
Yes, you can dump fuel (depending on the airplane).
One thing about the ditchings cited in the earlier post - notice a common factor? They all ran out of fuel and were forced to attempt water landings because they could not make it to land.
Of course, all of these airplanes were perfectly flyable up until the point that the engines stopped running. That there are so few examples is indicative of the extraordinary lengths that everyone goes to to keep airplanes OUT of the water. If you have fuel in the tanks, you try to make it to land.
To illustrate the difficulty of a water rescue, does anyone remember the Air Forida 737 crash in Washington DC? Remember the video of the people being hauled out of the river by a news helicopter? The one lady, blinded by jet fuel and freezing, who lost her grip and was saved by the man who jumped in the river to save her? This was a RIVER in a major metropolitan area on a weekday morning, and people still died in the water. Give me land any day.
I don’t know about that. I think it tells me, A) That ditchings of perfectly good airliners are extremely rare, period, that B) Airplanes rarely stop working over water, because jets that fly across oceans have to meet requirements that ensure they won’t fail (ETOPS notwithstanding).
Searching for ‘airliner forced landings’ on the same site shows a grand total of 13 forced landings of airliners on record, of which three were on the water, and ten were on the land. I don’t think you can draw any conclusions from that.
Do pilots prefer land to water? The only possible answer to that is ‘it depends’. For example, the crew of a TACA 737-300; near New Orleans, LA, lost both engines due to hail, while they were flying near the coastline. They initially chose to ditch the aircraft in the ocean along the shoreline, but at the last minute they spotted a grass landing strip on a levee on the Intracoastal waterway, and landed on it without incident. The jet was even repaired and flown off the levee.
The moral of that story: If you’re planning on ditching in the water and you see a perfectly good runway, it would be better to land on the runway. Other than that, I’d be hesitant to draw any conclusions.
As for which one is safer - well, we just don’t have enough data, and it’s kind of a meaningless question because every decision will depend on local factors.
After talking with a B-52 Nav and a couple of their pilots, I’d have to agree with 'em: ditch on the land.
Hell, even if it were on land in enemy territory, you’d have a much better chance of surviving before being ‘picked up’ than you would on water. Even if you did make it to a friendly airfield, you’d have friendly fire/crash rescue crews ready to help you either evacuate or at least extinguish a burning airframe.
Um, do you realise that firefighters do not put out oil fires with water? This is because oil floats on water. You dump water on an oil fire, you are just making things worse because the fire now spreads.
While I too think a ground landing is safer overall, I agree with Sam that a water landing seems much less likely to involve fire. So what if the fuel floats and spreads? The water will do a much better job at snuffing out potential ignition sources, which I would guess would be friction as the airframe hit the surface or possibly engine hotspots.
The reasons for coming down on land that overcome this advantage of water are, IMHO, easier access for rescue personnel, and survivability of injured passengers (assuming they get out of the plane at all).
However, if I was on the crew of a KC-135 tanker that had to make a forced landing, I think I’d opt for the water.
hijack/
I’ve used the term “KC-135 tanker” here twice in the last week or so, and I doubt I’ve ever used it among my friends in the RW. Yet another reason I love this place…/hijack