But I assume you will then concede that your use of the word “absolutist” here, when I said “pretty much”, was, erm pretty much (?) wrong?
I mean, at least give me some credit for the fact that I found the raw data (which I linked to), worked out clear (well, pretty clear) summary statistics and posted them, so that people can (pretty much) judge for themselves. Your contribution was (pretty much) to spend several paragraphs quibbling with the meaning of “pretty much”.
Why would you assume that had anything to do with phones? That is such a bizarre interpretation. When I was on a flight last month, all the shades were already down when we boarded and most stayed that way. It’s not like they were all open and people closed them. Depending on the time and direction of takeoff the sun can be blinding.
Why do I think that?
Because substantially everyone I could see was reading on their phone or tablet throughout the taxi and takeoff plus approach and landing. And during the flight several people got growled at by tablet readers for raising their shade.
I agree that the airline sets up this problem by leaving shades down while the aircraft is parked at the gate. That definitely helps keep it cool during the day in anything but cold conditions. Where they drop the ball safety-wise IMO is in not asking for them to be opened for takeoff and again for landing. Bright sun or no. Enroute it doesn’t matter.
Thanks, as per usual. You say the Captain at least was probably alive when the plane landed (due to the taxied off the runway bit). Would it have been possible for him to depressurise the plane himself? Is it possible, that the other crew were dead/incapacitated before landing?
I have always been fascinated by this case.
The L-1011 cockpit is spacious; it looks more like the bridge of a ship.
For either pilot to depressurize the aircraft the normal way they’d need to
A) Be told by the FAs over the intercom that they can’t get the doors open;
B) Realize pressurization was the problem;
C) Realize the Flight Engineer (“FE”) wasn’t responding;
D) Slide their seat back;
E) Unstrap and stand up, which is always a bit of contortion even in a spacious cockpit;
F) Take a couple steps to reach the FE panel;
G) Find the pressurization section of the FE panel perhaps though dense smoke;
H) Flip the appropriate switches;
I) Hope the power was still on and the control wires weren’t burned through.
It’s likely the hoses for the pilots’ oxygen masks are too short to still have the mask on while reaching back there. The First Officer (“FO”) starts out closer to the FE panel than the Captain does, but probably not enough closer. So a pilot trying to do that would probably have to remove his oxygen mask to get back there. Which may well have been a promptly incapacitating move itself.
Aircraft of that era had separate oxygen masks and smoke googles which resemble snorkeling masks. You’d be hard pressed to remove the oxygen mask without dislodging the smoke goggles. In any significant amount of smoke the instant reaction to smoke in the eyes is that they close and stay closed. Now you’re blind, trying to fumble to find the right knobs / buttons on a wall festooned with them: Lockheed L-1011-385-3 TriStar K1 (500) - UK - Air Force | Aviation Photo #1748812 | Airliners.net
All in all, that would probably be a bridge too far given how close to the end they already were. On a sunny smoke-free day at the gate it’s the work of seconds.
The other way to depressurize is to kill the engines. Which takes just a couple seconds and is easily done from the pilot’s normal seating position. So far so good.
Then wait a few *minutes *as the pressure leaks down through the mostly but not entirely closed pressurization control valves. I’ve heard hangar tales of empty airplanes being inadvertently pressurized. It’s usually a 10+ minute process to get the doors open after the source of air is cut off. And that’s with no fire or panic or incapacitation to contend with.
It’s been years since I read of this accident but I believe the fire department eventually shut down the engines by the expedient of blasting enough water down the intakes to choke out the engines’ fires. Good thing #2 with its more inaccessible intake was already shut down. Once all engines quit running the pressurization eventually dropped away. I don’t know whether the cabin roof burned through first; that’d certainly depressurize things all but instantly. But would also be far, far after the interior conditions were unsurvivable.
The problem with short oxygen hoses still exists. A couple years ago UPS had a 757 or 767 freighter develop a smoky fire in the overhead control panel above and between the pilots. Procedure is both pilots immediately don oxygen mask and smoke goggles, then one pilot keeps flying while the other first fights the fire then deals with the emergency checklist, etc.
Sounds good except the handheld halon fire extinguisher is stored on the back wall of the cockpit and can’t be reached by either pilot while wearing their oxygen mask; the mask hose is too short.
The Captain was the designated firefighter and elected to remove his mask to get the extinguisher and return to his seat. The smoke wasn’t too thick yet, but he still got a lungful of gunk. They landed successfully.
Had their fire been faster growing or gotten bigger before they noticed it the whole scenario could have gone irretrievably pearshaped from the moment the Captain tried to get the extinguisher.
Fire other than in the engines is the one scenario that keeps me up at night. I’m far from alone in that.
@LSLGuy thanks for the insights.
It’s amazing to read how poorly things were designed in the not-so-distant past. But I guess it may not have been that the safety aspect just did not occur to designers, but perhaps that what we’d now consider a straightforward design change might have been a lot more expensive to engineer in those days?
“Poorly” is perhaps an overstatement. Stuff can get overlooked, and stuff can also be the result of thoughtful compromise. Lots of lessons learned the hard way are converted into FAA orders to reengineer and retrofit stuff. Often at silly expense versus the incremental benefit. Other areas haven’t gotten that level of attention. Yet.
Oxygen masks serve two purposes: to protect against depressurization at altitude and against smoke inhalation. The former is the 99% case, the latter the 1% case. Careful engineering goes into the process of fitting every control and switch and accessory in there someplace. There’s only so much prime and non-prime-but-still-reachable-while-seated real estate to go around.
I haven’t been aboard a Lockheed since around 1994; I’m not recalling what their oxygen arrangements looked like. The 757/767 mask rig was one of the first compact installations. It stows in a 6" square compartment about 8" deep down by the pilots’ outboard knee. The hose is a woven fireproof cloth sheath over a ~3/8" rubber hose. As opposed to the 1+" diameter corrugated hoses that led to the old style masks that hung from the ceiling behind the crewman’s shoulder.
There’s 6-ish feet of hose in there. 4 feet of which are needed to get to where your face is while seated normally. About 2 feet of slack remains. There’s not space to expand the compartment enough to stuff 6 more feet of hose in there. And for a freight outfit like UPS, even if you made the hose 6 feet longer that still confines you to the cockpit; the fire might be 100 more feet behind you and you’re the only available fireman. So portable masks & oxygen supplies cover that area.
UPS’ solution was to move the cockpit handheld fire extinguisher(s) closer to the crew’s seating position. And give up some useful storage space that was used every day on a non-emergency basis to instead have the extinguisher reachable for the once per decade industrywide occurrence of a cockpit fire. Seems like a reasonable engineering solution. AFAIK that’s not an FAA mandate.
In all, most current smoke goggles are a rinky dink solution to a smoky fire. They’re also a last-ditch defense after all the other steps taken to make fires improbable and, failing that, largely self-extinguishing.
I used to fly a newer type that had an integral oxygen mask and full-face smoke mask. Like firemen now wear with their backpack oxygen source. Ideal for keeping your face and vision clear in a smoky environment. Awesome. But …
It took up a lot of space where there was not much to spare and the faceplate slowly got scratched up and hard to see through as the mask was pulled out, used, and stowed every time the other pilot went to use the lav enroute. Conversely the difficult to use separate smoke masks common to other aircraft types never got any wear and tear and so were crystal clear years after installation.
There’s always a tradeoff.
Back to the OP, first class might be in the front due to:
Your are First Classing the wrong way.
You are supposed to be:
While the tail section spirals down with the passengers strapped in, the front will rocket away and, because of (note to self: insert stuff about air pressure here later) all the passengers are sucked out the back and go tumbling to the earth shrieking in terror.
The benefit of being in the back is that in addition to remaining in your seat there’s a backup battery for the on board entertainment system, so if you’re near the end of “Jack Reacher: Never Go Back” you can finish it before you slam into the ground.
I think people need a reality check if they actually think that people who fly first class are somehow offended, distressed, or otherwise put out by the mere act of viewing people walk past them on their way to business, economy plus, or economy class seating. Come on.
Would that change of the commoners were flogged by the flight attendants while running the gauntlet of the FC cabin? Or perhaps the FC passengers would like the chance to do some flogging themselves?
Easy-The best way to sell the product is to make sure everyone sees the product. If it was in the back, it would be “out of sight-out of mind”
Or that they have any reaction at all. The vast majority of premium-class fliers are regular peasants whose employers are paying for travel. Hardly anyone pays full price for their own first class seat; they’re either business travelers, or frequent fliers cashing in for an upgrade.
Well that’s skewing it a bit, isn’t it. Giving more weight to incidents where more people died will do that. It would be fairer to say that out of 49 fatal accidents, 27 of them had no survivors. Or to say that 31 had more than half the occupant die, compared to 18 with more than half surviving.
Yup, I fly about 100k miles in some years; when I do get upgrades, all I think is “glad I’m not in economy this time.”
I agree that it’s tricky to give a single summary statistic that captures what’s relevant, that’s why I wrote out a detailed bucketed distribution so you could see the detail.
The question arose in the context of asking if the rear of the plane is really any safer. One poster responded with “it doesn’t matter, aren’t most airline accidents all-or-nothing”, so that was the moot issue. If you have a fatal incident where very few people die at all (there were 10 where only 1 or 2 people died) then it did not matter much where you sat, since you were unlikely to die wherever you sat. In other words, those 10 incidents are close to the “none” category.
It’s only accidents where intermediate numbers died in which your position in the plane might have been be a significant factor in your probability of survival. It think the best way to summarize might therefore be:
49 total fatal accidents
10 in which so few people died that your seat position had low significance
12 in which intermediate numbers died and your seat position may have been significant
4 in which >95% died so your seat position had low significance
23 in which 100% died so your seat position had no significance
If we are looking at only 12 accidents the chance of really getting any meaningful idea is close to zero. Every one of those accidents will be different. I notice that at least one accident the Popular Mechanics article cited was a runway accident. 6 of the accidents they looked are below - I can’t be bothered searching further. Anyway, they only looked at US accidents. Which is easier, but hardly representative.
Delta Airlines 191 seems to be the poster child for wanting to sit at the back. Probably because the tail was the furtherest from the on-ground accident when the plane ploughed into a car.
Eastern Airlines 401 you died if you were over the wing. But this seems to be because the plane broke into parts and the mid section was the worst affected after the crash - probably because the fire was the worst there.
United Airlines 232 is the exact opposite. The plane broke up and if you were not in the above wing section you died. Even then half those in the mid section (but those in the rear of the mid section) died.
These two show the futility of the drawing conclusions from such a limited sample set.
Eastern Airlines 66 seems to be a bit of a repeat of Delta 191. The few that survived were in the rear, and although the rear was inverted after the plane broke up it itself remained intact. The rest of the plane disintegrated and the passengers suffered extreme trauma that was way past survivable.
Korean 801 seemed to distribute its survivors along the length of the plane, but one also notes that all those in first class seemed to survive. The aircraft was only half full, so it is hard to know what the distribution of passengers that dies was - it isn’t on the map in the report.
Northwest 255 only had one survivor - a 4 year old child. She had been in seat 8F. She was probably just plain lucky. The entire plane disintigrated and was spread over a distance of 3000 feet, and every single seat had separated from the fuselage during the crash. But she had been seated at the front.
The point being that every one one of these accidents is so different to another that any attempt to make sensible correlations with seating position and survivability is not valid. There have not been enough crashes to glean any sort of meaningful statistics, and the “striking” numbers the Popular Mechanics article cites are as much due to chance distribution in a far too small sample set as anything real.
I will note that some of the survivable accidents were a while ago, and due to micro-burst or other very severe weather at the airport. This is one thing that has been addressed with the advance of technology, and it seems that such accidents are proportionally less common. So the chance that your own near fatal air-crash in of the type that might have favoured a survival at the back of the plane is probably lower than it once was.
Right – “for a few bucks more, you could fly in style”. And the boarding-first bit means the FC passengers have time to get some service while still sitting on the ground pre-departure.
That however is becoming more restricted as employers tighten their perks budget and airlines tighten their rewards programs.
Of course then there’s also how something like half the regular coach seats unexplainably become “preferred” and you can only have them preassigned at extra cost…
If anyone’s interested in looking at the others, in the data set that I was looking at (NTSB 1982-2009) the 12 fatal incidents with more than 2 fatalities but less than 95% fatalities were these. The first two numbers are #fatalities #survivors.
9 328 2/24/89 HONOLULU, HI UNITED AIRLINES BOEING 747-122
4 110 2/4/86 NEAR ATHENS, GREECE TRANS WORLD AIRLIN ES BOEING 727-231
10 129 6/1/99 LITTLE ROCK, AR AMERICAN AIRLINES MCDONNELL DOUGLAS MD-80
12 89 8/31/88 DALLAS/FT WORTH, TX DELTA AIRLINES BOEING 727-232
7 33 12/3/90 ROMULUS, MI NORTHWEST AIRLINES MCDONNELL DOUGLAS DC-9-14
20 63 2/1/91 LOS ANGELES, CA USAIR BOEING 737-300
25 52 11/15/87 DENVER, CO CONTINENTAL AIRLIN ES MCDONNELL DOUGLAS DC-9-14
110 175 7/19/89 SIOUX CITY, IA UNITED AIRLINES MCDONNELL DOUGLAS DC-10-10
25 22 3/22/92 FLUSHING, NY USAIR FOKKER 28-4000
37 20 7/2/94 CHARLOTTE, NC USAIR DOUGLAS DC-9-30
126 26 8/2/85 DALLAS/FT WORTH, TX DELTA AIRLINES LOCKHEED L-1011-3 85-1
11 2 10/19/04 KIRKSVILLE, MO CORPORATE AIRLINES British Aerospace Jetstream 32
source
http://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/data/Pages/paxfatal.aspx