What happens to passengers during a plane crash? Video. About what the bodies of passengers can tell about a plane crash What a person experiences when an airplane crashes

I have always wondered what people experience in a falling plane. Summarizing the experience of eyewitnesses who survived the plane crashes, we can draw one interesting conclusion - the devil is not so terrible as he is painted ...

First, be more afraid when driving to the airport. In 2014, more than 33 million flights were flown in the world, there were 21 plane crashes (moreover, most of the troubles in the sky are caused by cargo transportation), in which only 990 people died. Those. the probability of a plane crash is only 0.0001%. During the same year, in Russia alone, 26,963 people died in road accidents, and according to the WHO, 1.2 million people die in road accidents in the world every year and about 50 million are injured.

Secondly, judging by the statistics, you have much more chances of dying on an escalator in the subway or contracting AIDS than dying on an airplane. So the chance of dying in a plane crash is 1 in 11,000,000, while, for example, in a car crash - 1 in 5,000, so now it is much safer to fly than to drive a car. Moreover, aviation technology is becoming safer every year. By the way, Africa remains the most unfavorable continent from the point of view of flight safety: only 3% of all flights in the world were performed here, but 43% of plane crashes occurred!

Thirdly, with strong overloads, you will not remember anything. According to research by the Interstate Aviation Committee, the consciousness of a person in a falling plane is turned off. In most cases - in the first seconds of the fall. At the moment of collision with the ground there is not a single person in the cabin who is conscious... The body's defense reaction is said to be triggered. This thesis is confirmed by those who managed to survive in plane crashes. Silence accompanies minor aircraft incidents, video compilation

Fourth, the experience of surviving plane crashes. The story of Larisa Savitskaya is included in the Guinness Book of Records. In 1981, at an altitude of 5220 meters, the An-24 aircraft in which she was flying collided with a military bomber. In that disaster, 37 people died. Only Larisa managed to survive.

I was 20 years old then, - says Larisa Savitskaya. - Volodya and I, my husband, flew from Komsomolsk-on-Amur to Blagoveshchensk. I immediately fell asleep after takeoff. And she woke up from the roar and screams. Cold burned my face. Then I was told that our plane had its wings cut off and the roof blown off. But I don't remember the sky above. I remember there was a fog, like in a bathhouse. I looked at Volodya. He didn't move. Blood spurted down his face. I somehow immediately realized that he was dead. And I prepared to die too. Then the plane collapsed and I lost consciousness. When I regained consciousness, I was surprised that I was still alive. I felt that I was lying on something hard. It turned out in the aisle between the chairs. And next to it is a whistling abyss. There were no thoughts in my head. Fear too. In the state I was in - between sleep and reality - there is no fear. The only thing I remembered was an episode from an Italian film where a girl, after a plane crash, soared in the sky among the clouds, and then, falling into the jungle, remained alive. I didn’t hope to survive. I just wanted to die without suffering. I noticed the bars of the metal floor. And I thought: if I fell sideways, it would be very painful. I decided to change position and group. Then she crawled to the next row of chairs (our row stood near the break), sat down in a chair, grabbed the armrests and rested her feet on the floor. She did all this automatically. Then I look - the earth. Very close. She grabbed the armrests with all her might and pushed off the chair. Then - like a green explosion from larch branches. And again a blackout. When I woke up, I saw my husband again. Volodya sat with his hands on his knees and looked at me with a fixed gaze. It was raining, which washed the blood from his face, and I saw a huge wound on his forehead. A man and a woman lay dead under the chairs ...

Later it was established that the piece of the plane - four meters long and three meters wide, on which Savitskaya fell, planned like an autumn leaf. He fell into a soft swampy clearing. Larisa lay unconscious for seven hours. Then for two more days I sat in a chair in the rain and waited for death. On the third day I got up, started looking for people and came across a search party. Larisa received several injuries, a concussion, a broken arm and five cracks in her spine. You can't go with such injuries. But Larisa refused the stretcher and reached the helicopter herself.

The plane crash and the death of her husband stayed with her forever. According to her, her feelings of pain and fear are dulled. She is not afraid of death and still flies calmly on airplanes.

Another case confirms the loss of consciousness. Arina Vinogradova is one of the two surviving flight attendants of the Il-86 aircraft, which in 2002, barely taking off, fell into Sheremetyevo. There were 16 people on board: four pilots, ten flight attendants and two engineers. Only two flight attendants survived: Arina and her friend Tanya Moiseeva. They say that in the last seconds the whole life is scrolled before the eyes. This was not the case with me, - says Arina to Izvestia. - Tanya and I were sitting in the first row of the third saloon, at the emergency exit, but not in service seats, but in passenger seats. Tanya is opposite me. The flight was technical - we just had to return to Pulkovo. At some point, the plane began to shake. This happens at the Il-86. But somehow I realized that we were falling. Although nothing seemed to happen, there was no siren or roll. I didn't have time to get scared. Consciousness instantly drifted away somewhere, and I fell into a black void. I woke up from a sharp jolt. At first I did not understand anything. Then I figured it out a little. It turned out that I was lying on a warm engine, littered with chairs. Itself could not unfasten. She began to scream, pound on metal and shake Tanya, who then raised her head, then again lost consciousness. We were dragged out by firemen and taken to different hospitals.

Arina still works as a flight attendant. The plane crash, she said, left no trauma in my soul. However, the incident influenced Tatyana Moiseeva very strongly. Since then, she no longer flies, although she has not left the aviation.

Fifth, a plane crash is a positive experience for survivors! Scientists have come to unique conclusions: people who survived plane crashes later turned out to be healthier from a psychological point of view. They showed less anxiety, anxiety, did not become depressed and did not experience post-traumatic stress, in contrast to the subjects from the control group, who had never had such an experience.

In conclusion, I bring to your attention a speech by Rick Elias, who was sitting in the front row of the plane that made an emergency landing in the Hudson River in New York in January 2009. You will find out what thoughts came to him as the doomed plane fell down ...

Are you still afraid to fly ?-)

Original taken from in

Outside the black box

Dennis Shanaghan works in a large space on the second floor of his home with his wife, Maureen, ten minutes' drive from downtown Carlsbad, California. He has a quiet and sunlit office that makes it impossible to guess what a terrible job they do here. Shanaghan is an expert in personal injury. He devotes much of his time to studying wounds and fractures in living people. He is invited for consultations by companies that produce cars whose customers are suing on the basis of dubious reasons ("the seat belt broke," "I was not driving," etc.), which can be checked by the nature of their damage. But in parallel with this, he deals with dead bodies. In particular, he took part in the investigation into the circumstances of the crash of Flight 800 of Trans World Airlines.

The plane, which took off from the John F. Kennedy International Airport on July 17, 1996 in Paris, exploded in the air over the Atlantic Ocean near East Morich, New York. Eyewitness accounts were conflicting. Some claimed to have seen a rocket hit the plane. Traces of explosives were found in the wreckage, but no traces of the shell were found. (Later it turned out that the explosives were planted on the plane long before the crash - as part of a training program for sniffer dogs.) Theories about the involvement of government services in the explosion were spread. The investigation was delayed due to the lack of an answer to the main question: what (or who) dropped the plane from the sky to the ground?

Soon after the crash, Shanaghan flew to New York to examine the bodies of the victims and draw possible conclusions. Last spring I went to Carlsbad to meet him. I wanted to know how a person does this kind of work - scientifically and emotionally.
I had other questions as well. Shanaghan knows the ins and outs of the nightmare. He can tell in merciless medical details what happens to people in various disasters. He knows how they usually die, whether they are aware of what is happening, and how (in a crash at low altitude) they could increase their chances of escape. I said that I would take an hour of his time away from him, but I stayed with him for five hours.

A crashed plane can usually tell its own story. Sometimes this story can be heard literally as a result of transcribing the recordings of voices in the cockpit, sometimes conclusions can be drawn as a result of examining the broken and burned fragments of the crashed plane. But when a plane crashes into the ocean, its story can be incomplete and awkward. If in the place of the fall it is especially deep or the current is too strong and chaotic, the black box may not be found at all, and the fragments raised to the surface may not be enough to unambiguously clarify what happened on the plane a few minutes before the disaster. In such situations, specialists turn to what in textbooks on aviation pathological anatomy is called "human debris", that is, to the bodies of passengers. Unlike wings or fuselage fragments, bodies float to the surface of the water. Examining the injuries received by people (what their type, severity, which side of the body is affected) allows the expert to piece together the fragments of the terrible picture of what happened.

Shanaghan is waiting for me at the airport. He wears Dockers boots, a short-sleeved shirt, and aviator-style glasses. Hair is neatly parted. They look like a wig, but they are real. He is polite, discreet and very pleasant, reminds me of my familiar pharmacist Mike.

It does not at all look like the portrait that I have made in my head. I imagined an unfriendly, emotionless, possibly verbose person. I was planning to conduct an interview in the field, at the crash site of some plane. I pictured the two of us in a morgue temporarily built in a small town dance hall or in a university gym: he in a stained lab coat, me with my notebook. But that was before I realized that Shanaghan was not personally involved in autopsies. This is done by a group of medical experts from a morgue located near the crash site. Sometimes he still goes to the site and examines the bodies for one purpose or another, but still basically he works with ready-made autopsy results, correlating them with the passenger boarding scheme in order to identify the location of the source of damage. He informs me that to see him at work. at the scene of the accident, it is probably necessary to wait several years, since the causes of most of the disasters are quite obvious and to clarify them, it is not necessary to study the bodies of the victims.

When I tell him about my disappointment (because I am unable to report from the crash site), Shanaghan gives me a book called Aerospace Pathology, which, he assures me, has photographs of things that I could would be seen at the crash site. I open the book in the Body Layout section. Small black dots are scattered in the diagram showing the location of the aircraft fragments. Lines were drawn from these points to the descriptions taken out of the diagram: “brown leather shoes”, “co-pilot”, “fragment of the spine”, “stewardess”. Gradually, I get to the chapter that describes Shanagan's work (The Nature of Injury to People in Plane Crashes). Photo captions remind researchers, for example, that "extreme heat can create steam inside the skull, causing the skull to rupture, which could be confused with impact damage." It becomes clear to me that the black dots with the signatures give me an ample idea of ​​the consequences of the disaster, as if I had visited the site of the plane crash.

In the TWA 800 crash, Shanaghan suspected a bomb blast was the cause of the crash. He analyzed the nature of the destruction of the bodies in order to prove that an explosion had occurred on the plane. If he found traces of explosives, he would try to establish where the bomb was planted in the plane. He takes a thick folder from a drawer and pulls out his group's report. Here - chaos and gore, the result of the largest plane crash of a passenger plane in numbers, diagrams, and diagrams. The nightmare has been transformed into something that can be discussed over a cup of coffee at the morning meeting of the National Transportation Safety Board. "4:19. In emerging victims, right-sided injuries prevail over left-sided injuries ”. "4:28. Hip fractures and horizontal damage to the base of the seats ”. I ask Shanagan if a businesslike and detached view of tragedy helps suppress what I think is natural emotional experience. He looks down at his hands, fingers entwined, resting on the Flight 800 crash file.

“Maureen can tell you that I did not handle myself well in those days. Emotionally, it was extremely difficult, especially due to the large number of young people on that plane. The French club of one of the universities flew to Paris. Young couples. It was very difficult for all of us. " Shanaghan adds that this is an atypical state of the experts at the site of the plane crash. “In general, people do not want to dive too deeply into tragedy, so jokes and free communication are a fairly common demeanor. But not in this case. "

For Shanaghan, the most unpleasant thing about this case was that most of the bodies were almost intact. “The intactness of the bodies worries me more than its absence,” he says. Things that are difficult for most of us to look at - severed arms, legs, body parts - are a fairly familiar sight for Shanagan. “In that case, it's just a cloth. You can make your thoughts flow and do your job. ” It is blood, but it does not cause sorrow. You can get used to working with blood. With broken lives, no. Shanaghan works just like any pathologist. “You concentrate on individual parts, not on the person as a person. At autopsy, you describe the eyes, then the mouth. You do not stand next to him and do not think that this man is the father of four children. This is the only way to suppress your emotions. "

It's funny, but it is the intactness of the bodies that can serve as a clue to whether there was an explosion or not. We are on the sixteenth page of the report. Clause 4.7: “Fragmentation of bodies”. “People near the epicenter of the explosion are torn to pieces,” Dennis quietly informs me. This person has an amazing ability to talk about such things in a way that does not look overly patronizing or overly colorful. If there was a bomb on the plane, Shanaghan would have found a cluster of "highly fragmented bodies" corresponding to the passengers at the center of the explosion. But most of the bodies were intact, which is easy to see from the report if you know the color code used by the experts. To facilitate the work of people like Shanaghan, who have to analyze a large amount of information, medical experts use a code like this. Specifically, the bodies of the passengers on Flight 800 were marked green (intact), yellow (head bruised or one limb missing), blue (two limbs missing, head broken or intact), or red (three or more limbs missing or complete fragmentation of the body).

Another way to confirm the presence of an explosion is to study the number and trajectory of movement of "foreign bodies" that have pierced the bodies of the victims. This is a routine analysis performed with an X-ray machine as part of an investigation into the cause of any plane crash. During the explosion, fragments of the bomb itself, as well as of nearby objects, fly to the sides, hitting people sitting around. The spread of these foreign bodies can shed light on the question of whether there was a bomb, and if so, where. If an explosion occurred, for example, in a toilet on the right side of an aircraft, people sitting facing the toilet would be injured in the front of their bodies. Passengers at the aisle on the opposite side would have been wounded in the right side. However, Shanagan did not find such injuries.

Some of the bodies bore traces of chemical burns. This served as the basis for the emergence of a version that the cause of the disaster was a collision with a rocket. It is true that chemical burns in plane crashes are usually caused by contact with highly corrosive fuel, but Shanaghan suspected that the burns were caused by people after the plane hit the water. Fuel spilled on the surface of the water corrodes the backs of bodies floating on the surface, but not the faces. To finally confirm the correctness of his version, Shanaghan checked that chemical burns were only on the bodies that surfaced and only on the back. If the explosion had occurred on the plane, the splashed fuel would have burned people's faces and sides, but not their backs, which were protected by the backs of the seats. So, no evidence of a missile collision.

Shanaghan also drew attention to the thermal burns caused by the flames. A diagram was attached to the report. Investigating the nature of the location of the burns on the body (in most cases, the front part of the body was burned), he was able to trace the movement of the fire along the plane. Then he found out how badly the seats of these passengers were burned - it turned out to be much stronger than the passengers themselves, and this meant that people were pushed out of their seats and thrown out of the plane literally seconds after the fire broke out. A version began to take shape that the fuel tank in the wing had exploded. The explosion occurred far enough from the passengers (and therefore the bodies remained intact), but it was strong enough to disrupt the integrity of the plane to the point that it collapsed, and people were pushed overboard.

I asked why the passengers were carried out of the plane, because they were wearing seat belts. Shanagan replied that when the integrity of the aircraft is violated, enormous forces begin to operate. Unlike a shell burst, the body usually remains intact, but a powerful wave is capable of pulling a person out of the chair. “These planes fly at over 500 kilometers per hour,” Shanaghan continues. - When a crack appears, the aerodynamic properties of the aircraft change. The motors are still pushing it forward, but it loses its stability. It starts spinning with monstrous strength. The crack widens and in five or six seconds the plane falls apart. My theory is that the plane fell apart quickly enough, the seat backs fell off, and people slipped out of the straps that held them.

The nature of the injuries experienced by the passengers on Flight 800 confirmed his theory: most people had massive internal trauma, which is usually seen, in Shanaghan's words, when "hitting the water with extreme force." A person falling from a height hits the surface of the water and almost immediately stops, but his internal organs continue to move for a fraction of a second longer until they hit the wall of the corresponding body cavity, which at that moment began a return movement. Often during falls, the aorta ruptures, since one part of it is fixed in the body (and stops moving with the body), and the other part, located closer to the heart, is free and stops moving a little later. The two parts of the aorta move in opposite directions, and the resulting shear forces cause it to rupture. Severe damage to the aorta was found in 73% of the passengers on Flight 800.

In addition, when a body falling from a great height hits the water, rib fractures often occur. This fact was documented by former employees of the Civil Aeromedicine Institute Richard Snyder and Clyde Snow. In 1968, Snyder studied the autopsies of 169 suicides thrown off the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. 85% had broken ribs, 15% had their spine, and only a third had their limbs. By itself, a fracture of the ribs is not dangerous, but with a very strong blow, the ribs can pierce what is under them: the heart, lung, aorta. In 76% of the cases studied by Snyder and Snow, the ribs pierced the lung. The statistics for the crash of Flight 800 were very similar: most of the victims suffered some form of damage associated with a strong impact on the surface of the water. All had injuries accompanying a blunt blow from the chest, 99% had broken ribs, 88% had torn lungs, and 73% had aortic rupture.

If most of the passengers died as a result of a strong impact on the surface of the water, does this mean that they were alive and understood what was happening to them during the three-minute fall from a height? Alive, perhaps. “If by life you mean heartbeat and breathing,” says Shanaghan. "Yes, there must have been many of them." Did they understand? Dennis thinks it’s unlikely. “I think this is unlikely. Seats and passengers fly in different directions. I think people are completely disoriented. " Shanaghan interviewed hundreds of car and plane crash survivors about what they saw and felt during the crash. “I came to the conclusion that these people did not fully understand that they were seriously injured. I found them quite distant. They knew that some events were taking place around them, but they gave some unthinkable answer: “I knew that something was happening around, but I did not know what it was. I did not feel that it was about me, but, on the other hand, I understood that I was part of the events. "

Knowing how many passengers on Flight 800 had fallen out of the plane in an accident, I asked if any of them had even a small chance of surviving. If you enter the water like a sports diver, can you survive a fall from an airplane from a great height? At least once it happened. In 1963, Richard Snyder studied cases in which people survived by falling from a great height. In his work "Survival of People in Free Fall," he cites a case when one person fell out of an airplane at an altitude of 10 km and survived, although he lived only half a day. Moreover, the poor fellow was not lucky - he fell not into the water, but on the ground (however, when falling from such a height, the difference is already small). Snyder found that the speed of a person's movement when hitting the ground does not unambiguously predict the severity of the injury. He talked to escaped lovers who were more seriously injured from falling down stairs than a thirty-six-year-old suicide who threw himself on a concrete floor from a height of twenty-odd meters. This man got up and went, and he didn’t need anything but a band-aid and a visit to a psychotherapist.

Generally speaking, people falling from planes usually no longer fly. According to Snyder's article, the maximum speed at which a person has a measurable chance of survival when immersed in the water feet first (this is the safest position) is about 100 km / h. Considering that the final speed of a falling body is 180 km / h and that a similar speed is achieved already when falling from a height of 150 meters, few people will be able to fall from a height of 8000 meters from an exploded plane, survive and then give an interview to Dennis Shanaghan.

Was Shanaghan right about what happened to Flight 800? Yes. Gradually, all the main parts of the aircraft were found, and his hypothesis was confirmed. The final conclusion was this: sparks from damaged electrical wiring ignited fuel vapors, which led to the explosion of one of the fuel tanks.

The gloomy science of human mutilation emerged in 1954, when the British Comet planes, for some unknown reason, began to fall into the water. The first plane disappeared in January near the island of Elba, the second near Naples three months later. In both cases, due to the sufficiently large immersion depth of the debris of many parts of the fuselage, it was not possible to extract, so the experts had to study the "medical evidence", that is, examine the bodies of twenty-one passengers found on the surface of the water.

The research was conducted at the Royal Air Force Institute of Aviation Medicine at Farnborough under the direction of Captain W.K. Stewart and Sir Harold E. Whittingham, Director of Medical Services for the British National Airline. Since Sir Harold had more of all kinds of titles (at least five, not counting the title of nobility, were designated in the article published on the results of the research), I decided that he was the one in charge of the work.
Sir Harold and his group immediately drew attention to the peculiarity of the damage to the bodies. All the bodies had few external injuries and, at the same time, very serious damage to internal organs, especially the lungs. It was known that such lung injuries, which were found in the passengers of the "Kometa", can be caused by three reasons: a bomb explosion, a sharp decompression (which occurs when the pressurization of the aircraft cabin is broken), as well as a fall from a very high altitude. In a disaster like this, all three factors could play a role. Up to this point, the dead have not helped much to solve the mystery of the plane crash.
The first version, which began to be considered, was associated with a bomb explosion. But not a single body was burned, in none were found fragments of objects that could fly apart in an explosion, and not a single body, as Dennis Shanaghan would have noticed, was torn to pieces. So the idea of ​​an insane and hateful former airline employee familiar with explosives was quickly dismissed.

Then a group of researchers considered the version of a sudden depressurization of the cabin. Could this have caused such serious damage to the lungs? To answer this question, the experts used guinea pigs and tested their response to rapid changes in atmospheric pressure - from pressure at sea level to pressure at 10,000 m. According to Sir Harold, “the guinea pigs were somewhat surprised by what was happening, but showed no signs respiratory failure ". Other experimental data, obtained both in animals and in humans, similarly showed only a slight negative effect of pressure changes, which in no way reflected the state of the light passengers of the Comet.

As a result, only the latest version could be considered as the cause of death of the aircraft passengers - "an extremely strong impact on the water", and the collapse of the hull at a high altitude, possibly due to some structural defect, could be considered the cause of the crash. Since Richard Snyder wrote Fatal Injuries Resulting from Extreme Water Impact only 14 years after the events, the Farnborough team again had to turn to guinea pigs for help. Sir Harold wanted to establish exactly what happens to the lungs when the body hits the water at top speed. When I first saw the mention of animals in the text, I imagined Sir Harold heading towards Dover Rocks with a cage full of rodents and throwing innocent animals into the water, where his comrades were waiting in a boat with their nets spread. However, Sir Harold did a more meaningful thing: he and his assistants created a "vertical catapult" that allows you to achieve the required speed at a much shorter distance. “Guinea pigs,” he wrote, “were attached with duct tape to the underside of the carrier, so that when it stopped at the bottom of its trajectory, the animals flew belly forward from a height of about 8 cm and fell into the water.” I have a good idea of ​​what kind of boy Sir Harold was as a child.

In short, the lungs of the ejected guinea pigs closely resembled the lungs of the passengers on the Comet. The researchers concluded that the planes disintegrated at high altitude, causing most of the passengers to fall out of them and fall into the sea. To understand where the fuselage cracked, the researchers paid attention to whether the passengers were dressed or undressed when they were lifted from the surface of the water. According to Sir Harold's theory, a person who hits the water when dropped from a height of several kilometers should have lost his clothes, but a person who falls into the water from the same height inside a large piece of the fuselage must remain clothed. Therefore, the researchers tried to establish a line of collapse of the plane along the border passing between naked and clothed passengers. In the cases of both aircraft, people in the rear of the aircraft would have to be found clothed, while passengers closer to the cockpit would have been found naked or most of their clothing had been lost.

To prove this theory, Sir Harold lacked one thing: there was no evidence that a person loses clothes when falling into the water from a great height. Sir Harold undertook pioneering research again. While I would love to share with you how guinea pigs dressed in woolen suits and 1950s dresses were used in the next round of trials at Farnborough, unfortunately guinea pigs were not used in this part of the research. Several fully clothed dummies * were dropped into the sea from a Royal Aviation Center aircraft. As Sir Harold expected, they lost their clothes on impact on the water, and this fact was confirmed by the investigator Gary Erickson, who performed the autopsy of the suicides thrown into the water from the Golden Gate Bridge. As he told me, even when falling from a height of only 75 m, “shoes usually fly off, pants rip at the gusset, back pockets come off.”

*You might be wondering how it interested me if human corpses were ever used to reproduce the results of people falling from great heights. The manuscripts of two articles that brought me closest to this topic were JC Earley's Body Terminal Velocity, dated 1964, and JS Kotner's Analysis of the Effect of Air Resistance on the Falling Speed ​​of Human Bodies. (Analysis of Air Resistance Effects on the Velocity of Falling Human Bodies) from 1962 Both articles, unfortunately, have not been published. However, I know that if J.C. Earley had used dummies in his research, he would have written the word "dummies" in the title of the article, so I suspect that several donated bodies for scientific purposes did indeed jump into the water with heights. - Note. ed.

Ultimately, a significant portion of the Comet fragments were raised to the surface, and Sir Harold's theory was confirmed. The collapse of the fuselage in both cases actually occurred in the air. Hats off to Sir Harold and the Farnborough guinea pigs.
Dennis and I are having lunch at an Italian restaurant on the beach. We are the only visitors and therefore we can calmly chat at the table. When the waiter comes over to pour us some water, I shut up, as if we are talking about something secret or very personal. Shanaghan doesn't seem to care. The waiter peppers my salad for an infinitely long time, and Dennis at this time says that "... a specialized trawler was used to retrieve the small remains."

I ask Dennis how he can, knowing what he knows and seeing what he sees, still fly planes. He replies that not all accidents happen at an altitude of 10,000 m. Most accidents occur during takeoff, during landing or near the surface of the earth, and at the same time, in his opinion, the potential probability of survival is between 80 and 85%.

For me, the key word here is the word "potential". This means that if everything happens according to an evacuation plan approved by the Federal Aviation Agency (FAA), there is an 80-85% chance of surviving. Federal law requires aircraft manufacturers to provide for the ability to evacuate all passengers through half of the aircraft's emergency exits in 90 seconds. Unfortunately, in a real-life situation, evacuation rarely proceeds as planned. “When you consider disaster cases in which people can be saved, even half of the emergency exits are rarely open,” says Shanaghan. "Plus, there is chaos and panic on the plane." Shanaghan gives the example of the Delta plane crash in Dallas. “In this accident, it was quite possible to save all people. People received very few injuries. But many died in the fire. They crowded around the emergency exits, but could not open them. " Fire is the number one killer in plane crashes. It does not take a hard blow to explode the fuel tank and engulf the entire aircraft. Passengers die from suffocation as the air becomes scalding hot and filled with toxic smoke from the burning hull of the aircraft. People also die, because they break their legs, crashing into the chair in front, and cannot crawl to the exit. Passengers cannot follow the evacuation plan in the required order: they run in panic, push and trample each other *.

* This is the secret of survival in such disasters: you have to be a man. An analysis of the events of three plane crashes using an emergency evacuation system conducted in 1970 by the Institute of Civil Aeromedicine showed that the most important factor contributing to human survival is gender (this is the second most important factor that follows the proximity of the passenger seat to the emergency exit). Adult males have a significantly higher chance of escape. Why? Probably because they are capable of sweeping everyone else out of the way. - Note. ed.

Can manufacturers make their aircraft less fire hazardous? Of course they can. They can design more emergency exits, but they don't want to, as this will lead to fewer seats and lower revenues. They can install water sprinklers or shock-resistant systems to protect fuel tanks, as in military helicopters. But they do not want to do this either, since this will make the plane heavier, and more weight of the car means more fuel consumption.

Who decides to sacrifice human lives but save money? Allegedly the Federal Aviation Agency. The problem is that most improvements to aircraft safety are measured in terms of cost effectiveness. To quantify the “benefit,” each life saved is expressed in dollar terms. The US Urban Development Institute calculated in 1991 that each person is worth $ 2.7 million. “This is a financial expression of human death and its impact on society,” FAA spokesman Van Goody told me. While this figure is significantly higher than the cost of raw materials, the figure in the “benefit” column rarely rises to the point where it surpasses the cost of manufacturing aircraft. To explain his words, Goody used the example of three-point seat belts (which, like in a car, are thrown over the waist and over the shoulder). “Well, okay, the agency will say, we’ll improve the seat belts and thus save fifteen lives in the next twenty years: fifteen times two million dollars is thirty million. Manufacturers will come and say: to introduce such a security system, we will need six hundred and sixty-nine million dollars. " So much for the shoulder harnesses.

Why doesn't the FAA say, “Expensive. But will you still start releasing them? " For the same reason that it took the government 15 years to require the installation of airbags in cars. Regulatory authorities have no teeth. “If the FAA wants to introduce new rules, it has to provide industry with a cost benefit analysis and wait for a response,” Shanaghan says. - If the industrialists do not like the alignment, they go to their congressman. If you represent Boeing, you have tremendous influence in Congress. ”*

*It is for this reason that there are no airbags in modern aircraft. Believe it or not, the airbag system for aircraft (called the airstop restraint system) was designed; it consists of three parts that protect the legs, the seat underneath and the chest. In 1964, the FAA even tested the system on a DC-7 plane with dummies, causing the plane to crash into the ground near Phoenix, Arizona. While the test dummy, wearing a lap belt, was crushed and lost its head, the dummy, equipped with a new safety system, was perfectly preserved. The designers used stories from World War II combat aircraft pilots who inflated their life jackets just before the crash. - Note. ed. Since 2001, in order to improve the safety of passengers on airplanes, they began to install shoulder seat belts and airbags. As of the end of 2010, airbags were installed on the planes of 6o airlines worldwide, and this figure is constantly growing. - Note. per.

In defense of the FAA, it should be said that the agency recently approved the introduction of a new system that pumps nitrogen-enriched air into fuel tanks, which reduces the oxygen content in the fuel and, therefore, the likelihood of an explosion, leading, for example, to the crash of TWA 800.

I ask Dennis to give some advice to those passengers who, after reading this book, every time they board a plane, will wonder if they will end up being trampled by other passengers at the emergency exit door. He says the best advice is to stick to common sense. Sit closer to the emergency exit. In case of fire, bend as low as possible to avoid hot air and smoke. Hold your breath as long as possible so as not to burn your lungs and not inhale toxic gases. Shanaghan himself prefers window seats, as aisle passengers are more likely to be hit on the head by bags falling from the overhead storage compartment, which can open even with a slight shock.

While we wait for the waiter with the bill, I ask Shanaghan the question he has been asked at every cocktail for the past twenty years: Are passengers in the front or in the back more likely to survive a plane crash? "It depends on what type of accident we are talking about," he patiently replies. I will reformulate the question. If he has the opportunity to choose his seat on the plane, where does he sit down?

“First grade,” he replies.

Original taken from valkiriarf c About what the bodies of passengers can tell about the plane crash

Outside the black box

Dennis Shanaghan works in a large space on the second floor of his home with his wife, Maureen, ten minutes' drive from downtown Carlsbad, California. He has a quiet and sunlit office that makes it impossible to guess what a terrible job they do here. Shanaghan is an expert in personal injury. He devotes much of his time to studying wounds and fractures in living people. He is invited for consultations by companies that produce cars whose customers are suing on the basis of dubious reasons ("the seat belt broke," "I was not driving," etc.), which can be checked by the nature of their damage. But in parallel with this, he deals with dead bodies. In particular, he took part in the investigation into the circumstances of the crash of Flight 800 of Trans World Airlines.

The plane, which took off from the John F. Kennedy International Airport on July 17, 1996 in Paris, exploded in the air over the Atlantic Ocean near East Morich, New York. Eyewitness accounts were conflicting. Some claimed to have seen a rocket hit the plane. Traces of explosives were found in the wreckage, but no traces of the shell were found. (Later it turned out that the explosives were planted on the plane long before the crash - as part of a training program for sniffer dogs.) Theories about the involvement of government services in the explosion were spread. The investigation was delayed due to the lack of an answer to the main question: what (or who) dropped the plane from the sky to the ground?

Soon after the crash, Shanaghan flew to New York to examine the bodies of the victims and draw possible conclusions. Last spring I went to Carlsbad to meet him. I wanted to know how a person does this kind of work - scientifically and emotionally.
I had other questions as well. Shanaghan knows the ins and outs of the nightmare. He can tell in merciless medical details what happens to people in various disasters. He knows how they usually die, whether they are aware of what is happening, and how (in a crash at low altitude) they could increase their chances of escape. I said that I would take an hour of his time away from him, but I stayed with him for five hours.

A crashed plane can usually tell its own story. Sometimes this story can be heard literally - as a result of transcribing the recordings of voices in the cockpit, sometimes conclusions can be drawn as a result of examining the broken and burned fragments of the crashed plane. But when a plane crashes into the ocean, its story can be incomplete and awkward. If in the place of the fall it is especially deep or the current is too strong and chaotic, the black box may not be found at all, and the fragments raised to the surface may not be enough to unambiguously clarify what happened on the plane a few minutes before the disaster. In such situations, specialists turn to what in textbooks on aviation pathological anatomy is called "human debris", that is, to the bodies of passengers. Unlike wings or fuselage fragments, bodies float to the surface of the water. Examining the injuries received by people (what their type, severity, which side of the body is affected) allows the expert to piece together the fragments of the terrible picture of what happened.

Shanaghan is waiting for me at the airport. He wears Dockers boots, a short-sleeved shirt, and aviator-style glasses. Hair is neatly parted. They look like a wig, but they are real. He is polite, discreet and very pleasant, reminds me of my familiar pharmacist Mike.

It does not at all look like the portrait that I have made in my head. I imagined an unfriendly, emotionless, possibly verbose person. I was planning to conduct an interview in the field, at the crash site of some plane. I pictured the two of us in a morgue temporarily built in a small town dance hall or in a university gym: he in a stained lab coat, me with my notebook. But that was before I realized that Shanaghan was not personally involved in autopsies. This is done by a group of medical experts from a morgue located near the crash site. Sometimes he still goes to the site and examines the bodies for one purpose or another, but still basically he works with ready-made autopsy results, correlating them with the passenger boarding scheme in order to identify the location of the source of damage. He informs me that to see him at work. at the scene of the accident, it is probably necessary to wait several years, since the causes of most of the disasters are quite obvious and to clarify them, it is not necessary to study the bodies of the victims.

When I tell him about my disappointment (because I am unable to report from the crash site), Shanaghan gives me a book called Aerospace Pathology, which, he assures me, has photographs of things that I could would be seen at the crash site. I open the book in the Body Layout section. Small black dots are scattered in the diagram showing the location of the aircraft fragments. Lines were drawn from these points to the descriptions taken out of the diagram: “brown leather shoes”, “co-pilot”, “fragment of the spine”, “stewardess”. Gradually, I get to the chapter that describes Shanagan's work (The Nature of Injury to People in Plane Crashes). Photo captions remind researchers, for example, that "extreme heat can create steam inside the skull, causing the skull to rupture, which could be confused with impact damage." It becomes clear to me that the black dots with the signatures give me an ample idea of ​​the consequences of the disaster, as if I had visited the site of the plane crash.

In the TWA 800 crash, Shanaghan suspected a bomb blast was the cause of the crash. He analyzed the nature of the destruction of the bodies in order to prove that an explosion had occurred on the plane. If he found traces of explosives, he would try to establish where the bomb was planted in the plane. He takes a thick folder from a drawer and pulls out his group's report. Here - chaos and gore, the result of the largest plane crash of a passenger plane in numbers, diagrams, and diagrams. The nightmare has been transformed into something that can be discussed over a cup of coffee at the morning meeting of the National Transportation Safety Board. "4:19. In emerging victims, right-sided injuries prevail over left-sided injuries ”. "4:28. Hip fractures and horizontal damage to the base of the seats ”. I ask Shanagan if a businesslike and detached view of tragedy helps suppress what I think is natural emotional experience. He looks down at his hands, fingers entwined, resting on the Flight 800 crash file.

“Maureen can tell you that I did not handle myself well in those days. Emotionally, it was extremely difficult, especially due to the large number of young people on that plane. The French club of one of the universities flew to Paris. Young couples. It was very difficult for all of us. " Shanaghan adds that this is an atypical state of the experts at the site of the plane crash. “In general, people do not want to dive too deeply into tragedy, so jokes and free communication are a fairly common demeanor. But not in this case. "

For Shanaghan, the most unpleasant thing about this case was that most of the bodies were almost intact. “The intactness of the bodies worries me more than its absence,” he says. Things that are difficult for most of us to look at - severed arms, legs, body pieces - are a fairly familiar sight for Shanagan. “In that case, it's just a cloth. You can make your thoughts flow and do your job. ” It is blood, but it does not cause sorrow. You can get used to working with blood. With broken lives, no. Shanaghan works just like any pathologist. “You concentrate on individual parts, not on the person as a person. At autopsy, you describe the eyes, then the mouth. You do not stand next to him and do not think that this man is the father of four children. This is the only way to suppress your emotions. "

It's funny, but it is the intactness of the bodies that can serve as a clue to whether there was an explosion or not. We are on the sixteenth page of the report. Clause 4.7: “Fragmentation of bodies”. “People near the epicenter of the explosion are torn to pieces,” Dennis quietly informs me. This person has an amazing ability to talk about such things in a way that does not look overly patronizing or overly colorful. If there was a bomb on the plane, Shanaghan would have found a cluster of "highly fragmented bodies" corresponding to the passengers at the center of the explosion. But most of the bodies were intact, which is easy to see from the report if you know the color code used by the experts. To facilitate the work of people like Shanaghan, who have to analyze a large amount of information, medical experts use a code like this. Specifically, the bodies of the passengers on Flight 800 were marked green (intact), yellow (head bruised or one limb missing), blue (two limbs missing, head broken or intact), or red (three or more limbs missing or complete fragmentation of the body).

Another way to confirm the presence of an explosion is to study the number and trajectory of movement of "foreign bodies" that have pierced the bodies of the victims. This is a routine analysis performed with an X-ray machine as part of an investigation into the cause of any plane crash. During the explosion, fragments of the bomb itself, as well as of nearby objects, fly to the sides, hitting people sitting around. The spread of these foreign bodies can shed light on the question of whether there was a bomb, and if so, where. If an explosion occurred, for example, in a toilet on the right side of an aircraft, people sitting facing the toilet would be injured in the front of their bodies. Passengers at the aisle on the opposite side would have been wounded in the right side. However, Shanagan did not find such injuries.

Some of the bodies bore traces of chemical burns. This served as the basis for the emergence of a version that the cause of the disaster was a collision with a rocket. It is true that chemical burns in plane crashes are usually caused by contact with highly corrosive fuel, but Shanaghan suspected that the burns were caused by people after the plane hit the water. Fuel spilled on the surface of the water corrodes the backs of bodies floating on the surface, but not the faces. To finally confirm the correctness of his version, Shanaghan checked that chemical burns were only on the bodies that surfaced and only on the back. If the explosion had occurred on the plane, the splashed fuel would have burned people's faces and sides, but not their backs, which were protected by the backs of the seats. So, no evidence of a missile collision.

Shanaghan also drew attention to the thermal burns caused by the flames. A diagram was attached to the report. Investigating the nature of the location of the burns on the body (in most cases, the front part of the body was burned), he was able to trace the movement of the fire along the plane. Then he found out how badly the seats of these passengers were burned - it turned out to be much stronger than the passengers themselves, and this meant that people were pushed out of their seats and thrown out of the plane literally seconds after the fire broke out. A version began to take shape that the fuel tank in the wing had exploded. The explosion occurred far enough from the passengers (and therefore the bodies remained intact), but it was strong enough to disrupt the integrity of the plane to the point that it collapsed, and people were pushed overboard.

I asked why the passengers were carried out of the plane, because they were wearing seat belts. Shanagan replied that when the integrity of the aircraft is violated, enormous forces begin to operate. Unlike a shell burst, the body usually remains intact, but a powerful wave is capable of pulling a person out of the chair. “These planes fly at over five hundred kilometers per hour,” Shanaghan continues. - When a crack appears, the aerodynamic properties of the aircraft change. The motors are still pushing it forward, but it loses its stability. It starts spinning with monstrous strength. The crack widens and in five or six seconds the plane falls apart. My theory is that the plane fell apart quickly enough, the seat backs fell off, and people slipped out of the straps that held them.

The nature of the injuries experienced by the passengers on Flight 800 confirmed his theory: most people had massive internal trauma, which is usually seen, in Shanaghan's words, when "hitting the water with extreme force." A person falling from a height hits the surface of the water and almost immediately stops, but his internal organs continue to move for a fraction of a second longer until they hit the wall of the corresponding body cavity, which at that moment began a return movement. Often during falls, the aorta ruptures, since one part of it is fixed in the body (and stops moving with the body), and the other part, located closer to the heart, is free and stops moving a little later. The two parts of the aorta move in opposite directions, and the resulting shear forces cause it to rupture. Severe damage to the aorta was found in 73% of the passengers on Flight 800.

In addition, when a body falling from a great height hits the water, rib fractures often occur. This fact was documented by former employees of the Civil Aeromedicine Institute Richard Snyder and Clyde Snow. In 1968, Snyder studied the autopsies of 169 suicides thrown off the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. 85% had broken ribs, 15% had their spine, and only a third had their limbs. By itself, a fracture of the ribs is not dangerous, but with a very strong blow, the ribs can pierce what is under them: the heart, lung, aorta. In 76% of the cases studied by Snyder and Snow, the ribs pierced the lung. The statistics for the crash of Flight 800 were very similar: most of the victims suffered some form of damage associated with a strong impact on the surface of the water. All had injuries accompanying a blunt blow from the chest, 99% had broken ribs, 88% had torn lungs, and 73% had aortic rupture.

If most of the passengers died as a result of a strong impact on the surface of the water, does this mean that they were alive and understood what was happening to them during the three-minute fall from a height? Alive, perhaps. “If by life you mean heartbeat and breathing,” says Shanaghan. "Yes, there must have been many of them." Did they understand? Dennis thinks it’s unlikely. “I think this is unlikely. Seats and passengers fly in different directions. I think people are completely disoriented. " Shanaghan interviewed hundreds of car and plane crash survivors about what they saw and felt during the crash. “I came to the conclusion that these people did not fully understand that they were seriously injured. I found them quite distant. They knew that some events were taking place around them, but they gave some unthinkable answer: “I knew that something was happening around, but I did not know what it was. I did not feel that it was about me, but, on the other hand, I understood that I was part of the events. "

Knowing how many passengers on Flight 800 had fallen out of the plane in an accident, I asked if any of them had even a small chance of surviving. If you enter the water like a sports diver, can you survive a fall from an airplane from a great height? At least once it happened. In 1963, Richard Snyder studied cases in which people survived by falling from a great height. In his work "Survival of People in Free Fall," he cites a case when one person fell out of an airplane at an altitude of 10 km and survived, although he lived only half a day. Moreover, the poor fellow was not lucky - he fell not into the water, but on the ground (however, when falling from such a height, the difference is already small). Snyder found that the speed of a person's movement when hitting the ground does not unambiguously predict the severity of the injury. He talked to escaped lovers who were more seriously injured from falling down stairs than a thirty-six-year-old suicide who threw himself on a concrete floor from a height of twenty-odd meters. This man got up and went, and he didn’t need anything but a band-aid and a visit to a psychotherapist.

Generally speaking, people falling from planes usually no longer fly. According to Snyder's article, the maximum speed at which a person has a measurable chance of survival when immersed in the water feet first (this is the safest position) is about 100 km / h. Considering that the final speed of a falling body is 180 km / h and that a similar speed is achieved already when falling from a height of 150 meters, few people will be able to fall from a height of 8000 meters from an exploded plane, survive and then give an interview to Dennis Shanaghan.

Was Shanaghan right about what happened to Flight 800? Yes. Gradually, all the main parts of the aircraft were found, and his hypothesis was confirmed. The final conclusion was this: sparks from damaged electrical wiring ignited fuel vapors, which led to the explosion of one of the fuel tanks.

The gloomy science of human mutilation emerged in 1954, when the British Comet planes, for some unknown reason, began to fall into the water. The first plane disappeared in January near the island of Elba, the second near Naples three months later. In both cases, due to the sufficiently large immersion depth of the debris of many parts of the fuselage, it was not possible to extract, so the experts had to study the "medical evidence", that is, examine the bodies of twenty-one passengers found on the surface of the water.

The research was conducted at the Royal Air Force Institute of Aviation Medicine at Farnborough under the direction of Captain W.K. Stewart and Sir Harold E. Whittingham, Director of Medical Services for the British National Airline. Since Sir Harold had more of all kinds of titles (at least five, not counting the title of nobility, were designated in the article published on the results of the research), I decided that he was the one in charge of the work.
Sir Harold and his group immediately drew attention to the peculiarity of the damage to the bodies. All the bodies had few external injuries and, at the same time, very serious damage to internal organs, especially the lungs. It was known that such lung injuries, which were found in the passengers of the "Kometa", can be caused by three reasons: a bomb explosion, a sharp decompression (which occurs when the pressurization of the aircraft cabin is broken), as well as a fall from a very high altitude. In a disaster like this, all three factors could play a role. Up to this point, the dead have not helped much to solve the mystery of the plane crash.
The first version, which began to be considered, was associated with a bomb explosion. But not a single body was burned, in none were found fragments of objects that could fly apart in an explosion, and not a single body, as Dennis Shanaghan would have noticed, was torn to pieces. So the idea of ​​an insane and hateful former airline employee familiar with explosives was quickly dismissed.

Then a group of researchers considered the version of a sudden depressurization of the cabin. Could this have caused such serious damage to the lungs? To answer this question, the experts used guinea pigs and tested their response to rapid changes in atmospheric pressure - from pressure at sea level to pressure at 10,000 m. According to Sir Harold, “the guinea pigs were somewhat surprised by what was happening, but showed no signs respiratory failure ". Other experimental data, obtained both in animals and in humans, similarly showed only a slight negative effect of pressure changes, which in no way reflected the state of the light passengers of the Comet.

As a result, only the latest version could be considered as the cause of death of the aircraft passengers - "an extremely strong impact on the water", and the collapse of the hull at a high altitude, possibly due to some structural defect, could be considered the cause of the catastrophe. Since Richard Snyder wrote Fatal Injuries Resulting from Extreme Water Impact only 14 years after the events, the Farnborough team again had to turn to guinea pigs for help. Sir Harold wanted to establish exactly what happens to the lungs when the body hits the water at top speed. When I first saw the mention of animals in the text, I imagined Sir Harold heading towards Dover Rocks with a cage full of rodents and throwing innocent animals into the water, where his comrades were waiting in a boat with their nets spread. However, Sir Harold did a more meaningful thing: he and his assistants created a "vertical catapult" that allows you to achieve the required speed at a much shorter distance. “Guinea pigs,” he wrote, “were attached with duct tape to the underside of the carrier, so that when it stopped at the bottom of its trajectory, the animals flew belly forward from a height of about 8 cm and fell into the water.” I have a good idea of ​​what kind of boy Sir Harold was as a child.

In short, the lungs of the ejected guinea pigs closely resembled the lungs of the passengers on the Comet. The researchers concluded that the planes disintegrated at high altitude, causing most of the passengers to fall out of them and fall into the sea. To understand where the fuselage cracked, the researchers paid attention to whether the passengers were dressed or undressed when they were lifted from the surface of the water. According to Sir Harold's theory, a person who hits the water when dropped from a height of several kilometers should have lost his clothes, but a person who falls into the water from the same height inside a large piece of the fuselage must remain clothed. Therefore, the researchers tried to establish a line of collapse of the plane along the border passing between naked and clothed passengers. In the cases of both aircraft, people in the rear of the aircraft would have to be found clothed, while passengers closer to the cockpit would have been found naked or most of their clothing had been lost.

To prove this theory, Sir Harold lacked one thing: there was no evidence that a person loses clothes when falling into the water from a great height. Sir Harold undertook pioneering research again. While I would love to share with you how guinea pigs dressed in woolen suits and 1950s dresses were used in the next round of trials at Farnborough, unfortunately guinea pigs were not used in this part of the research. Several fully clothed dummies * were dropped into the sea from a Royal Aviation Center aircraft. As Sir Harold expected, they lost their clothes on impact on the water, and this fact was confirmed by the investigator Gary Erickson, who performed the autopsy of the suicides thrown into the water from the Golden Gate Bridge. As he told me, even when falling from a height of only 75 m, “shoes usually fly off, pants rip at the gusset, back pockets come off.”

*You might be wondering how it interested me if human corpses were ever used to reproduce the results of people falling from great heights. The manuscripts of two articles that brought me closest to this topic were JC Earley's Body Terminal Velocity, dated 1964, and JS Kotner's Analysis of the Effect of Air Resistance on the Falling Speed ​​of Human Bodies. (Analysis of Air Resistance Effects on the Velocity of Falling Human Bodies) from 1962 Both articles, unfortunately, have not been published. However, I know that if J.C. Earley had used dummies in his research, he would have written the word "dummies" in the title of the article, so I suspect that several donated bodies for scientific purposes did indeed jump into the water with heights. - Note. ed.

Ultimately, a significant portion of the Comet fragments were raised to the surface, and Sir Harold's theory was confirmed. The collapse of the fuselage in both cases actually occurred in the air. Hats off to Sir Harold and the Farnborough guinea pigs.
Dennis and I are having lunch at an Italian restaurant on the beach. We are the only visitors and therefore we can calmly chat at the table. When the waiter comes over to pour us some water, I shut up, as if we are talking about something secret or very personal. Shanaghan doesn't seem to care. The waiter peppers my salad for an infinitely long time, and Dennis at this time says that "... a specialized trawler was used to retrieve the small remains."

I ask Dennis how he can, knowing what he knows and seeing what he sees, still fly planes. He replies that not all accidents happen at an altitude of 10,000 m. Most accidents occur during takeoff, during landing or near the surface of the earth, and at the same time, in his opinion, the potential probability of survival is between 80 and 85%.

For me, the key word here is the word "potential". This means that if everything happens according to an evacuation plan approved by the Federal Aviation Agency (FAA), there is an 80-85% chance of surviving. Federal law requires aircraft manufacturers to provide for the ability to evacuate all passengers through half of the aircraft's emergency exits in 90 seconds. Unfortunately, in a real-life situation, evacuation rarely proceeds as planned. “When you consider disaster cases in which people can be saved, even half of the emergency exits are rarely open,” says Shanaghan. "Plus, there is chaos and panic on the plane." Shanaghan gives the example of the Delta plane crash in Dallas. “In this accident, it was quite possible to save all people. People received very few injuries. But many died in the fire. They crowded around the emergency exits, but could not open them. " Fire is the number one killer in plane crashes. It does not take a hard blow to explode the fuel tank and engulf the entire aircraft. Passengers die from suffocation as the air becomes scalding hot and filled with toxic smoke from the burning hull of the aircraft. People also die, because they break their legs, crashing into the chair in front, and cannot crawl to the exit. Passengers cannot follow the evacuation plan in the required order: they run in panic, push and trample each other *.

* This is the secret of survival in such disasters: you have to be a man. An analysis of the events of three plane crashes using an emergency evacuation system conducted in 1970 by the Institute of Civil Aeromedicine showed that the most important factor contributing to human survival is gender (this is the second most important factor that follows the proximity of the passenger seat to the emergency exit). Adult males have a significantly higher chance of escape. Why? Probably because they are capable of sweeping everyone else out of the way. - Note. ed.

Can manufacturers make their aircraft less fire hazardous? Of course they can. They can design more emergency exits, but they don't want to, as this will lead to fewer seats and lower revenues. They can install water sprinklers or shock-resistant systems to protect fuel tanks, as in military helicopters. But they do not want to do this either, since this will make the plane heavier, and more weight of the car means more fuel consumption.

Who decides to sacrifice human lives but save money? Allegedly the Federal Aviation Agency. The problem is that most improvements to aircraft safety are measured in terms of cost effectiveness. To quantify the “benefit,” each life saved is expressed in dollar terms. The US Urban Development Institute calculated in 1991 that each person is worth $ 2.7 million. “This is a financial expression of human death and its impact on society,” FAA spokesman Van Goody told me. While this figure is significantly higher than the cost of raw materials, the figure in the “benefit” column rarely rises to the point where it surpasses the cost of manufacturing aircraft. To explain his words, Goody used the example of three-point seat belts (which, like in a car, are thrown over the waist and over the shoulder). “Well, okay, the agency will say, we’ll improve the seat belts and thus save fifteen lives in the next twenty years: fifteen times two million dollars is thirty million. Manufacturers will come and say: to introduce such a security system, we will need six hundred and sixty-nine million dollars. " So much for the shoulder harnesses.

Why doesn't the FAA say, “Expensive. But will you still start releasing them? " For the same reason that it took the government 15 years to require the installation of airbags in cars. Regulatory authorities have no teeth. “If the FAA wants to introduce new rules, it has to provide industry with a cost benefit analysis and wait for a response,” Shanaghan says. - If industrialists do not like the alignment, they go to their congressman. If you represent Boeing, you have tremendous influence in Congress. ”*

*It is for this reason that there are no airbags in modern aircraft. Believe it or not, the airbag system for aircraft (called the airstop restraint system) was designed; it consists of three parts that protect the legs, the seat underneath and the chest. In 1964, the FAA even tested the system on a DC-7 plane with dummies, causing the plane to crash into the ground near Phoenix, Arizona. While the test dummy, wearing a lap belt, was crushed and lost its head, the dummy, equipped with a new safety system, was perfectly preserved. The designers used stories from World War II combat aircraft pilots who inflated their life jackets just before the crash. - Note. ed. Since 2001, in order to improve the safety of passengers on airplanes, they began to install shoulder seat belts and airbags. As of the end of 2010, airbags were installed on the planes of 6o airlines worldwide, and this figure is constantly growing. - Note. per.

In defense of the FAA, it should be said that the agency recently approved the introduction of a new system that pumps nitrogen-enriched air into fuel tanks, which reduces the oxygen content in the fuel and, therefore, the likelihood of an explosion, leading, for example, to the crash of TWA 800.

I ask Dennis to give some advice to those passengers who, after reading this book, every time they board a plane, will wonder if they will end up being trampled by other passengers at the emergency exit door. He says the best advice is to stick to common sense. Sit closer to the emergency exit. In case of fire, bend as low as possible to avoid hot air and smoke. Hold your breath as long as possible so as not to burn your lungs and not inhale toxic gases. Shanaghan himself prefers window seats, as aisle passengers are more likely to be hit on the head by bags falling from the overhead storage compartment, which can open even with a slight shock.

While we wait for the waiter with the bill, I ask Shanaghan the question he has been asked at every cocktail for the past twenty years: Are passengers in the front or in the back more likely to survive a plane crash? "It depends on what type of accident we are talking about," he patiently replies. I will reformulate the question. If he has the opportunity to choose his seat on the plane, where does he sit down?

“First grade,” he replies.

Valery Valiulin

Do I need it, right ?!

On real events. Names and surnames are excluded.

Arriving early in the morning at the service to perform the next training flights, I was very upset - the flights were repulsed. Flights are not often repulsed, mainly due to weather conditions that do not allow their implementation, in the absence of weather at alternate aerodromes, in accidents and disasters of the same type of aircraft, and you never know other reasons to postpone flights to another day. The reason for the end of flights stunned me - in the unit from which I transferred three years earlier, my friend, the commander of the ship with which I flew, once in the same crew, died for two years.

Subsequently, the flight and engineering staff of all aviation units were informed about the results of the investigation of the disaster, the reasons that led to the death of people and the loss of a combat vehicle, recommendations on measures to prevent the repetition of such tragedies in the future.

A colonel who arrived from Moscow, hanging in front of the aviation squadron a “sheet” * measuring “two hundred and twenty by one hundred and eighty”, with the route from the take-off airfield to the point of disaster marked on it by the unfinished crew, tried to convince us that a slow depressurization had occurred at high altitude cockpits. That all crew members, in violation of the instructions, flew at high altitude with relaxed oxygen masks, and lost consciousness due to a lack of oxygen and a decrease in pressure in the cockpit. That the plane, finding itself uncontrollable, fell into a tailspin, went over to supersonic speed, collapsed in the air, fell to the ground. Ejected, of the six crew members, only the navigator of the ship.

I listened attentively to the speech of the flight safety inspector and did not believe what I heard! So that such an oversight could be made by the commander, with whom we once deliberately performed a five-hour cross-country flight on an airplane with a faulty cockpit sealing system, which was always notified in the air about the well-being of the crew members ?! And now I hear his voice: "Crew, pull up oxygen masks, report on your health!" No! This is a lie in the name of preserving the positions of chiefs, hiding the true cause of the death of five crew members and the loss of a combat vehicle.

The years passed. Until my death, grief for my deceased friend and his crew will not leave me. I often dream about him. He dreams of his tense face at work, eyes intently observing the instruments, hands in leather gloves, not releasing the steering wheel.

All the comrades from the former regiment, with whom the flight service later took me, I asked about the details of this incident. All agreed on one thing - the authorities concealed the true cause of this disaster, but no one could know it for sure, they expressed only their assumptions.

The fellow soldiers, who tried to "talk" the navigator, the survivor, who was able to reveal the true cause of the incident, with the help of brandy and vodka, could not squeeze anything out of his lips, sealed by the command.

When the rescue team, in the snow-capped mountains, on a frosty February day, took the ship's navigator who had landed by parachute from the place of death of the crew, he was not wearing a helmet! There was only one way to rip the headset off his head, if it was not fastened. Consequently, the navigator during the flight was not wearing an oxygen mask, which is attached to the headset, breathed the air of the cockpit, but did not lose consciousness! Repeatedly in flights, as the navigator of the ship, I had to unfasten the oxygen mask with the permission of the commander, it interferes with leaning tightly against the rubber tube of the radar sight screen, interferes with seeing well the highlights from landmarks and targets. So to be a navigator without a mask at any stage of the flight is real.

When I was already retired, I told about my disbelief in the results of the investigation of this disaster to my neighbor, a retired colonel with whom we shared a common passion for literature and, in the past, service. Already ready for his imminent departure from life, struck by an oncological disease, he told me the true reason that led to the tragic death of a friend of my youth:

“You are right, Valera, that you do not recognize this false version about this catastrophe. On the plane, the engineering staff installed "KPZh-30" with unacceptable residues of alcohol vapors in it! Those who cleaned the oxygen equipment important for the life support of the crew in flight, did not fulfill the requirements set by the instructions, installed the KPZh-30 on the aircraft without blowing it until it was completely purified from alcohol vapors. The flight lasted 52 minutes. The crew breathed oxygen in flight, mixed with alcohol vapors, and was simply poisoned! This is the second time in our Air Force that people were killed due to such a violation, bordering on a crime. The first such incident with the death of the crew happened so long ago that they stopped remembering it or, like this time, concealed the true cause of the disaster in order to preserve the "skins" of the perpetrators. Due to the position I occupied in those years, I was aware of the true cause of this disaster. Most of the flight and engineering personnel were then given false information about the causes of that disaster. Blaming the dead, so as not to destroy the families of many of the living - this is the principle that the Air Force has always pursued. Until now, no one knows how many of the first cosmonauts died in space before the flight of Yuri Gagarin. "

The era of digital civilization has come. I found on the Internet everything that was found about the effect of alcohol vapors on the human body when inhaled, made conclusions about how pilots could behave under the influence of alcohol, which penetrated into the blood and into the human brain directly through the lungs, bypassing the stomach. The performances are creepy!

At the initial intoxication, the muscular activity of a person is activated and the pilots could do anything, unreasonably "dragging the steering wheel", adding and decreasing engine speed, take the plane beyond the critical angles of attack and roll, for unacceptable flight speeds. In the future, a person intoxicated by alcohol vapors falls asleep and may simply die! I know of two cases of death of people in the air when: one - drank hard on the eve of the flight as a passenger; the other took a flat bottle of cognac into the air so as not to get bored during a long flight in his one-seater suspended cockpit and had no task for this flight in his specialty. There were even more cases of loss of consciousness in flight by those who took off "with a hangover", having managed to "slip through" the pre-flight medical control.

The rest of my life I imagined myself in the place of the navigator of the ship on that unfortunate flight, trying to "see" the actions of the pilots, poisoned against their will by alcohol fumes.

The reason for a similar plane crash in the Air Force, which killed people many years before this crash, was either hidden or forgotten. Failure to familiarize the flight and technical crew with that incident led to its repetition many years later. I do not remember that when checking the equipment before departure, the instructions required to sniff the oxygen supplied to the masks from the KPZh-30. "Yes, he always smells of alcohol!" - Anyone flying will say.

Traffic police officers are equipped with a device that detects the presence of alcohol in the body of vehicle drivers, but aircraft crews do not have a device that can determine the presence of alcohol in oxygen before departure, which they have to breathe in flight. Maybe breathalyzers of DPS nicknames are suitable for such control of the oxygen equipment of aircraft and can protect the flight crew from forced intoxication in flight ?! Then why is such a check not carried out ?!

Every six months, "KPZh-30" is removed from each aircraft. Every six months they are rinsed with alcohol to remove dirt and grease from the system (pure oxygen, when combined with fats, can ignite!) Then "KPZH-30" is blown with air under a certain pressure, dried before being filled with liquid oxygen. This means that every six months you can expect a similar tragedy if the engineering and technical staff violates the requirements for their maintenance established by the instructions.

How can you hide the truth about the true causes of disasters from people whose lives depend on their knowledge ?! In twenty-two years of service in aviation, I have never heard of such alcohol poisoning - through the oxygen system!

Later, I asked many colleagues about whether they had to deal with the fact of the presence of alcohol vapors in oxygen equipment in flight? And I heard: “We once fell out of the plane with the entire crew under the bald by flying around the aircraft after its repair at the aircraft factory! The day before, the authorities accused the aviation technicians of saving alcohol when flushing the KPZ-30 for the sake of flushing their stomachs with it, so they left enough alcohol vapors in the KPZ to prove that it was not so.

I also found on the Internet a skirmish between the then ejected navigator of the ship with one of his colleagues, who tried to accuse the deceased commander of the ship and his crew members of an illiterate act when the aircraft cabin was depressurized at high altitude:

Navigator - "The Prosecutor": - I would never write what I am writing now, but you touched on our crew, and there is no one else to answer. As before, I am ironic about the system for determining the best crew, but at the time of the disaster, our crew was named the best in the regiment. KK *'s mask was on and fully pulled up. And he lost consciousnessfor a completely different reason, before my eyes.

I was also the navigator of the innocently accused crew commander for two years and, too, joining the navigator who survived a terrible catastrophe, I can protect him without naming him. Our deceased commander was a competent pilot, he knew aerodynamics and the plane better than many colleagues, he was a first-class pilot who treasured the lives of people whom he lifted into the air. We have repeatedly found ourselves with him in difficult situations in the air, from which we competently emerged. Once we got away from an obvious collision in the air with a huge Aeroflot airliner. Then the air traffic controllers made a mistake, bringing the boards together at the point of intersection of our route with the air route at the same echelon (the same flight altitude), without separating the planes by the time of its crossing. The commander was the first to see the IL-62 approaching us and "dived" under it. I even saw the faces of passengers clung to the windows, so dangerously we got close.

“Killed! They killed! " - shouted the wife of the commander, running to the headquarters of the regiment, having learned about the death of her husband, the father of two boys of preschool age, and four more members of his crew. How right she was when they tried to instill something completely different in her.

* Air Force- air Force.

* KK is the commander of the ship.

* "Sheet" (in the Air Force)– diagram, drawing, visual teaching aid, made on a Whatman sheet measuring 220 cm by 180 cm.

* "KPZh-30"– liquid oxygen is stored on the aircraft in oxygen gasifiers, arranged according to the typeDewar vessels (KPZh-30, SKG-30, etc.).

Many people are afraid of flying by air, and this means of transportation is the fastest and most convenient.

Consider and how a person feels when an airplane crashes. The most reliable information about detailed experiences can be obtained from people who have experienced this experience for themselves.

Each accident is the result of the influence of several reasons, the main one of which is human factor... That is, traditionally, the reason for the fall of air transport is usually a mistake made by the crew.

Another common reason is aviation terrorism, which is much less common. Consider the statistics on this matter:

• 60% - accidents caused by pilot errors;
• 20% - difficulties associated with technical problems;
• 15% - situations that have manifested themselves in the course of weather conditions;
• 5% - aviation terrorism and other factors.

The main cause of accidents is the human factor

The most common mistakes made by air transport employees:

1. Failure to comply with the piloting procedures according to the regulations.
2. Insufficiently high level of pilots' qualifications.
3. Error in the operation of navigation devices.
4. Failure to comply with the rules of maintenance.
5. Erroneous situations caused by ground controllers.
6. Problems of the psychological state of the pilot and the assistant.

Most often, accidents occur during takeoff or landing of an aircraft., while the vehicle is in controlled control, but loses its spatial orientation.

Feelings of a person when an airplane crashes

As scientific studies have shown, when a vehicle is overloaded, a person is unlikely to clearly remember the events. This is due to the increased protection of consciousness.

Passengers will remember only the first seconds when the plane began to fall, and at the next stages, the body's protective reaction will turn on and consciousness will turn off.

According to research, in the process of colliding with the ground, not a single person was conscious, this suggests that he could not experience feelings.

This fact was confirmed by people who managed to survive in such a crash. When asked how the passengers of the falling plane feel, they replied that they only remember the shock and overload.

The sensations of passengers when the cabin is depressurized

The pressure on such a large takes on much lower values ​​than above its surface, as well as temperature indicators. Lack of oxygen interferes with the normal functioning of the body.

Modern cinema has significantly influenced public consciousness, showing that even an insignificant hole on the surface of the skin leads to the death of the entire passenger train.

In fact, the opposite is true. Of course, the damage to the skin is abnormal, but this does not indicate a catastrophic scale of the problem.

The main problem with depressurization of the cabin is the lack of oxygen... If every "traveler" is fastened according to the rules of the instructions, no serious complications should arise.

Moreover, the aircraft is designed to maintain an integral structure and is capable of completing the started flight. The main thing is to be able to timely notice the drop in pressure and the fact that the oxygen level has decreased.

When depressurizing, you must wear masks with oxygen

What happens to people when they hit the ground

If the boarding is controlled, the passengers may be awake, but it is clouded. Most often, the answer to the question of how people feel when a plane crashes is "nothing."

We have already noted that at altitude, the body's defensive reaction turns on, and it goes into temporary hibernation until the situation stabilizes.

People can involuntarily feel shaking and a little fear.

According to the testimony of those who managed to survive the crash of the airliner, they practically do not remember anything.

Crew actions in case of plane crash

In order to create favorable conditions for the comfortable well-being of passengers, it is necessary to carry out a number of activities.

At first, prevent oxygen starvation among passengers by offering them put on special masks... Breathing may be rapid and people may feel a little dizzy. Then the brain cells gradually die, so timely taking the right action is designed to prevent death.

Secondly when the first signs of a problem are found pilots descend to a relatively safe altitude of 3-4 km... At this level, a sufficient amount of oxygen is assumed for proper breathing and normal life of the body.

After the situation normalizes, it is necessary to make a decision on further actions. Typically, this is an emergency landing at a nearby port.

Most aircraft accidents happen during takeoff or landing.

What passengers should do

An important role is played by the behavior of passengers during a crash.... We examined what happens to people during a plane crash.

Passengers faced with decompression factors must adhere to the following rules:

1. Keeping calm and not to escalate panic states.
2. Do whatever the crew says... Listen carefully to the instructions from the staff.
3. Wear oxygen masks and, if necessary, help others to accomplish this task.
4. Buckle up and sit quietly in the chair during the flight, which will avoid traumatic consequences in the turbulence zone.

Can you survive a plane crash?

In addition to the question of what a person feels during a plane crash when falling, another question involuntarily arises: "Is it possible to survive in this situation?" As practice shows, of course you can. But on condition that the pilots noticed the problems in a timely manner and proceeded to eliminate them.

Compliance and the absence of an anxiety state guarantees peace and well-being of passengers.