The first lesson I learned as a pilot is that airplanes are incredibly forgiving beasts.  Seriously, you almost have to try to crash them on purpose.  This runs counter to conventional beliefs because movies and the media always play up the stewardess being sucked out of the cabin angle, or the gremlin on the wing angle.  Learning how to crash-land a plane is one of the most interesting lessons that a begining pilot is taught.  Flying is not nearly as spontaneous as one thinks.  There is a checklist for everything.  My checklists were always on a clipboard that wrapped around my right leg, secured with a velcro strap.  If you think that’s kind of silly you should see the volumes of checklists that astronauts have to follow to do anything. 

Practicing crash landings is like a dress rehearsal for a performance you never wish to be in.  At the last minute you pull up of course, otherwise you have to explain to farmer John why there is a Cessna burning in his field.  The closest I ever came to an accident was in fact a landing.  I took a friend up for her birthday.  While landing, the plane bounced several times, several meters up off the runway.  She didn’t realize how badly I had botched it.  Never during all my instruction had such a thing happened but having memorized my checklist I was able to recover.  That brings me finally to Flight 358.  Science Daily reports:

All 297 passengers and 12 crew survived a catastrophic airliner fire Tuesday at Toronto’s international airport, a Canadian airport official said.

The official stressed he was quoting “unconfirmed reports.” He said there appeared to be only 14 minor injuries, but could not confirm that one of Air France Flight 358’s pilots had been taken to the hospital

He refused to speculate on the cause of the fire. The airliner after a flight from Paris.

Earlier, flame and smoke were pouring out of the passenger airliner at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport shortly after an accident around 4 p.m. EDT Tuesday.

So how and why did the passengers survive such a burning heap? For the last few months I have been reading the brilliant book, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers.  It is essentially a book about dead bodies. Chapter six in the book is titled Beyond the Black Box.  It’s an entire chapter that is dedicated to dead bodies involved in airplane crashes.  According to interviews in the book, nearly 80 to 85% of plane crashes are potentially survivable because they happen on takeoff and landing, and not high in the sky (more on that in a moment).   The number one killer in crash landings (fire) is exacerbated by panic.  When faced with imminent death people will scramble like animals toward the doors.  People seated next to the window paradoxically have a greater chance of survival because the contents of the overhead bins won’t knock them out.  Studies have shown that the single most important factor in determining who will survive and who won’t is gender.  Adult men are the most likely to survive, presumably because they push others out of the way and trample them to get to the exit.  In listening to interviews of Flight 358 passengers in the next few days I am going to listen to see if that was true in this case.  To the credit of these mostly Canadian passengers, all reports thus far say they followed the crews instructions well.

Now, by contrast an explosion in the air is highly unsurvivable.  Air India Flight 182 is a good example of this.  Not everyone was killed by the bomb when it went off above the Atlantic of course.  A good many died when their bodies hit the water.  Often when hitting turbulence that’s really bad, I wonder what would happen if the plane cracked in half and I got sucked out.  Even if you are over water, if you are higher than 500 feet in the air then your body (feet first, which is the optimal position) will strike the surface much higher than 70 mph, which is just about the survivable threshold.  At higher speeds than that the most common cause of death is a ripped aorta or a rib cracking and fatally puncturing one of your organs.  How do they know all this?  Sir Harold Whittingham working on behalf of Britain’s Royal Air Force conducted a study on guinea pigs in the 1954 (by putting them in a vertical catapult and measuring when their lungs ruptured).  The investigation was launched after a series of accidents involving the British Comet, the most notable of which occured in Calcutta in 1953.

Also, while I have your attention, check out this classic BBC clip about the Comet starting service to India.