Question about airplane crash fatalities (morbid)

Factual Questions
21

One more comment - just because people are found strapped in their chairs does not mean that they survived the initial breakup.

When an airplane breaks up in flight, the forces on every part of that plane are HUGE. Often the airplane just turns into near-confetti, and debris is strewn over a large area. The initial forces on the passengers during the breakup are often going to be instantly fatal.

At the Reno Air Races one year an aircraft suffered a catastrophic failure in flight (I think it was “Miss Ashley”, a modified P-51). The stabilizer failed, which caused an immediate pitch forward. The force tore the wings off the airplane, and the fuselage continued ahead and impacted the ground. An autopsy on the pilot showed that even though he remained strapped in the intact cabin until impact, the force of the breakup probably killed him instantly.

22

Sam, that’s usually a g-force overload, isn’t it? A variation on the “innards torn loose” scenario, where your outsides undergo some sort of acceleration/deacceleration but your insides attempt to continue along your original flight path? Basically, even if the outer wrapper is still intact the insides have been torn up?

23

Just to nitpick. Helicopters that impact the water inverted do not make “soft” water landings. :eek:

This training is done because helicopters are very, very top heavy (engines, transmissions and rotors all up on top). When helicopters crash or do a forced landing into the water (softly or not), they pretty much always roll upside down immediately and then begin sinking.

I get to do this training every four years. I know a few people who have experienced this for real, and they say the training is pretty close to what happens in real life. In fact, they credit the training with saving their lives.

24

Actually, piston-powered helicopters tend to have their engines mounted lower. Fortunately, I’ve never had the opportunity to test empirically how a piston-powered helicopter settles into the water.

In case anyone is interested, there are a couple of ditching procedures for helicopters. If you have enough power to hover (e.g., you’re still flying, but a power loss is imminent) you come into a hover just above the water and allow your passenger(s) to bail. Then you fly a safe distance away to ditch. Ditching with power or without power are similar. (A power-off ditching is just like an autorotation landing, which is kind of similar to a powered landing; but I won’t get into the specifics here.) The pilot touches down, then immediately closes the throttle (if he has power). The helicopter is tilted to one side to stop the rotor blades (which will probably break off – hence, getting a safe distance away from passengers in the event of a power-on scenario). Once the blades are safely stopped/gone, calmly unstrap the safety belts (or “crash belts”, as I like to call them) and swim out of the helicopter and up to the surface. Do not inflate your LPU until you are safely away from the helicopter. Inflating it inside the aircraft might make it difficult or impossible to escape.

Regarding aviation accidents in general, most are survivable. I haven’t read the most recent Nall Report (I’m sure you can find it if you are interested), so obviously I could not have crunched the numbers; but I’ll bet that on average less than one in five aviation accidents result in a fatality. Many fatal crashes do not result in the fatalities of all aboard.

25

Not true! I flew to England in a plane with aft-facing seats. The C-5A is equipped with 73 airline-style seats on its upper deck (under the tail but above the rear ramp) and every blessed one faces backward. Takeoff was a little bizarre, but on landing, when the thrust reversers and brakes were engaged, I was pressed into my seat in a most comforting way.

26

I’ve started a thread for discussion of the 2002 Nall Report.

Maybe someone with more ambition than I have will come up with the overall percentage of fatal accidents to all accidents.

27

Fixing the link.

28

Ah, I should have clarified…I meant on commercial aircraft. I’ve flown in that passenger compartment in the C-5 when my airplane broke in Spain. Also, whenever we loaded the blue “airline” seats on the C-141 they were facing aft. With no windows, lousy noise insulation and a drafty interior do you think any of the passengers would complain about aft-facing seats? :wink:

29

Oh, and before someone mentions it: I know that Southwest has a few aft-facing seats on each aircraft. I’m talking about having every seat face aft.

30

MATS DC-6 (C121?) coming back from far East in 1964 had all seats facing rear. I stood up for 33.5 hrs. ( except for time pilots let me on the flight deck ) I can’t do backwards in anything for over a few minutes…

31

When one considers what F=ma means for anyone unfortunate enough to be in an airplane accident, it’s nothing short of a wonder individuals survive these things. I’m trying to get my head around the forces involved. Perhaps someone more knowlegible in physics and engineering can help me out. I’m going to make some assumptions, just to give us a reference point. Please feel free to rap my knucklies if my WAGs are totally out of line.

To make things extremely simple, consider a largish person, 100kg.

Throw that person into a wall at a realistic cruising speed for an automobile, 100km/h, or about 27.8m/s.

Say it takes an average of 0.05 sec for all of that person’s mortal remains to come to a complete stop. We’ll take that to calculate the person’s rate of deceleration upon striking the wall.

That person very rapidly feels a total force of about 55600N, spread over an area of maybe 1m^2 (another WAG of the cross-sectional area of a standing human about 2m in height).

Take the same person and throw them into a wall at the cruising velocity of an airplane, reasonably about 700km/h, or roughly 200m/s, that person hits with a force (assuming they decelerate at the same rate, which is probably a poor assumption) of about 400000N, spread over the same area.

To put this in perspective, if this person laid down on top of you, you’d feel a force of 980N spread roughly over your body.

The force of an automobile-speed impact is about the equivalent of putting 56 people on top of you. The force of an airliner-speed impact is about like putting over 400 people on top of you. The former, you’re squashed flat; the latter, you’re liquified.

Is this anywhere near a realistic way to provide a benchmark for experience?

32

Pam am 103 website:
"Some of the people aboard the aircraft have been conscious about their final fate all the way down.For some of them the fall took almost 2 minutes - the lack of oxygene in the uppe spheres might have let people meet death unconsciously, some might have regained consciousness when falling further down into oxygene-rich atmosphere. 2 bodies could not be identified. 658 bags of human remains are still to be identified.

Only one woman survived the accident. But not for long. Scottish rescue workers found a woman on the ground with a pulse.
But the pulse was gone 10 minutes later. The woman was never conscious, never lived to tell about her experience during those horrible minutes before the crash.

http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/5260/victim.html