Just to be clear, it’s not that the broken wing flips the plane. when a wing tip digs into the ground it shears the wing off. The other wing is still getting lift from 120+ mph wind and lifts up causing the plane to rotate on it’s axis.
Thank you for the correction. I summarized the video incorrectly.
I only saw the footage of the crash (as opposed to the aftermath) this morning. It looked to me as if the right main gear collapsed, causing the wing to strike the ground and be shorn off.
The good news: I just came back from a cruise to the eastern Carribean.
The bad news: I was supposed to fly from Montreal to Toronto on Monday and I just got back now.
The Montreal airport was nuts, with the double-whammy of weather delays from the weekend and all of the Toronto cancellations on Monday.
My mother-in-law was supposed to fly to Washington today, Schlepped out to the airport to find that Air Canada cancelled the flight, had to go back through Canadian immigration to try again tomorrow.
Here is a very similar accident from 1999:
Hard landing sorta sideways, wing drags, wing shears off, plane rolls onto its back, then slides to a stop on fire. Substantially everyone got out alive.
Here’s China Airlines 642 - Google Image Search some pix.
I was at Pearson in 2005 (waiting for a flight to Minneapolis, coincidentally) when the Air France flight went off the end of the runway, crashed into a creek, and burned up… and no one died. In the terminal we were all looking at the flames and smoke in the distance saying “oh no, people died,” but amazingly no one did. The worst thing to happen was all our flights were delayed six or seven hours.
Odd that the last two complete hull losses in Pearson resulted in no deaths. Incredible luck.
Let’s remember that a lot of landing accidents are survivable. There’s a reason flight attendants are fanatical about making sure people have their seatbelts on and tray tables stowed (so they don’t interfere with an evacuation). The people in the most recent Toronto accident found themselves firmly secured upside down and some of the injuries only occurred when they unstrapped. We’ve learned a lot about how to make aviation crashes survivable, and these instances can sort of be considered successes.
I’ve watched FAs being trained. They are put through some serious drills and when they aren’t serving drinks and s**t gets real they are suddenly yelling directions as clearly and forcefully as drill sergeants. That’s the other factor in making aviation mishaps survivable.
There have been a lot of crashes you’d think nobody could walk away from. The Sioux City DC-10 accident was horrific and incredible that there were any survivors at all:
All this to say, I’m glad we’re in a moment where aviation is very safe, and often remains so when things go badly awry.
I taught my KIDS from an early age: “The flight attendants are not here to serve you drinks. They are here to keep you safe. They only serve you drinks to pass the time. Do everything they tell you.”
One of my employees was on that flight coming back from Croatia. He was remarkably calm about it.
Yea, because everyone knows Boeing planes are so poorly deigned and fragilay they can’t even take a scratch without falling out of the sky.
Delta’s update on the pilots involved. Nothing stands out.
All the injured are out of the hospital.
Is this a rhetorical device? I suppose your statement is factually correct, if perhaps callous. Of the 315 people on board the aircraft, three died as a result of the crash.
I recently saw a video of the plane at the moment of touchdown. There was an immediate burst of flame and vast amounts of black smoke. It truly is a wonder that everyone survived. It appears that the emergency crews at Pearson were commendably competent, and from one brief video I saw at least one flight attendant was doing her job with consummate skill, ushering passengers out the door with – as @Llama_Llogophile said – the authority of a drill sergeant.
Fuselage staying together and not hitting anything hard but just sliding to a natural stop, and then a properly conducted evac, would seem to be an important factor.
I’ve worn harness before, skydiving, working at heights & in the fire/rescue world. One should wear them snug so that if the bottom does fall out, literally, one doesn’t ‘fall’ into the harness.
While maybe not ‘injured’ I wonder how many of the pax received bruising from a too-loose seat belt when it suddenly went from resting on them to supporting them.
This is just another reminder to not just wear your seat belt but to wear it properly, which means not too loose, during your flight!
I wear it loose (for comfort) during cruise. “Falling” a few inches into my loose seatbelt if the plane suddenly pulls a negative g in severe turbulence isn’t going to be injurious. However, I do pull it quite snug during takeoff and landing because of the potential for much more violent decelerations in a crash; I want to decelerate with the airframe, not by slamming into my inelastic seatbelt. Many late-model cars are equipped with pyrotechnic seat belt tensioners for this very reason.
In my line of work in that sort of situation, losing just 1% is a pretty darn good result. Celebrate the 312 who lived when they might well not have.
That was Boeing thirty years ago. Since then it merged with McDonnell Douglas and the focus shifted from engineering to profit.
On paper, Boeing was the company that bought McDonnell Douglas. But many of the leadership ranks became filled with McDonnell Douglas veterans, not Boeing executives.
Many of them had financial backgrounds, not the engineering backgrounds of those who had run Boeing in the past. Or they came from outside of the company, such as from General Electric, where cost-cutting and improved efficiency was a near religion.
One of those was Jim McNerney, who became Boeing CEO in 2005, after a career that started at consumer products maker Procter & Gamble, included time at management consultant McKinsey & Co., and was followed by years at GE. He was CEO of 3M before being tapped to run Boeing, without any engineering and limited aerospace experience.