mrsmcfall:
I read a great book by Dr. Nuland called “How We Die”, and the author describes the random murder of a little girl. The author tries to analyze what was going through the girl’s mind as she was dying and from a medical standpoint, he opined that in violent deaths, the human body releases a plethora of chemicals which allow our frail brains to be at ease with what is happening to us. This is not to say that a violent death would be pleasant; it isn’t. However, I do agree with the author that the human body is too marvelous a machine to just let us experience and process head-on the violence that is being inflicted upon us. I can’t remember the name of the chemical process, but there is a certain amount of peace and ease which comes along with a violent death. Think of it as “nature’s heroin”, something that helps us deal with the trauma…be it a horrific airplane crash, a stabbing death, the whole nine yards. The same can be said of all mammals when they are eaten or something else violent happens.
I think about this when I picture people who have had severe trauma happen to them which causes them to expire.
It is one thing for your brain to block out physical pain and trauma. There is a lot of evidence of people who are severely injured not really feeling their injuries at the time they occurred.
In this case though the passengers are not experiencing phsyical trauma byt mental trauma. The physical trauma at the end, when they hit the water, was probably mercifully short. It was the three minutes of terror prior to that which would have sucked and I doubt most people’s brains protect them from it.
LSLGuy , a Doper and a large commercial jet pilot, posted the following in another thread. You can see the people on board were not blissfully unaware but rather losing their shit…sometimes literally.
Cabin experience. I have never personally stalled or gotten close to stalling a big jet. But I did talk, not 3 months ago, to one of our pilots who had been through a big jet near-stall while riding as a passenger. This was not on an Airbus, but the general picture will probably apply to an A330.
For whatever combination of reasons, the pilots got slow enough at altitude that the aircraft *almost *stalled. They were in smooth air, not in clouds and it was daytime.
From everything appearing completely normal, there was suddenly agressive short sharp banging turbulence. And mild wing-rock, 10-15 degrees each way. Wing rock doesn’t feel like just a mild S-turn. More like a juddering slap off to the left. Then to the right. etc. For the first few seconds there was gasping from the crowd. About the third time a wing dropped, a few people screamed. At each successive rock the screaming got louder & involved more people.
The aircraft was in a recoverable situation when the problem started and the pilots did the recovery correctly. After about 30 seconds of the above experience and (WAG) 8000 feet of altitude loss (including ears popping a bit), the ride was over.
There was no doubt in my co-worker’s mind that a sizeable fraction of the pax were in fear for their lives. This was a domestic US flight. There was lots of screaming of Jesus! & Oh God! etc.
He said his own reaction was a mixture of “I know what’s going on”, “I know how badly this can end”, “I know these guys ought to be able to recover” and “But if they goofed up enough to get into this situation, how much can I beleive they’ll get back out?” He was real concerned at first (ironically before most of the pax had gotten excited) but as he felt the right pilot reactions happening he became optimistic it would come out OK, even as the rocking got worse.
They changed an awful lot of seat cushions in that airplane. Many people had soiled themselves.
Was the A330 accident exactly like this? Beats me. But I bet it was pretty similar; just 7 or 8 times longer and at night in the weather. Whether the night & weather made it scarier or better since there was nothing to see outside to measure the motion against is an open question.
But I’d bet a paycheck nobody was sound asleep or reading their magazine by the time the ocean arrived. And I only get paid once a month.