Staying alive – the essential guide to surviving air travel
What it won’t reveal is why only eight passengers survived.
However, data from previous aviation disasters would suggest that many more of those on board should have come out of it alive. The accident involving the discount Indian airline wasn’t like the other, where the only survivor, a little boy, lived through no actions of his own, but simply because of his position in the plane and his youth.
The Indian crash involved a plane that split apart when it hit rough ground – or perhaps before it, if reports of an explosion on board prove to be accurate. One of the survivors emerged without a scratch or a scorch mark. Others were burned as they got out. But none of those who talked to the media suggested that it was particularly difficult to escape the aircraft.
“Luckily, I saw the opening where the plane had split in two,” Pradeep G Kotian, a 28-year-old man, told the Press Association. “I jumped out of it.”
Three other passengers did the same. It sounds simple: get to the open bit where the plane has split in two and jump out there, yet they talked of their “miraculous” escape. In fact, the miracle evident in this and countless other air disasters is not the positive one of escaping passengers, but the negative one of passengers who should have escaped but didn’t. Long before the two bits of the Boeing came to rest, passengers knew it was in dire trouble. The space offered by the division of the fuselage was big enough to allow a fast stream of passengers through, and, since the machine had landed before the trouble started, it’s unlikely that all 166 on board were too severely injured to get out. But they didn’t.
The European Transport Safety Council maintains that 40% of the people who die in plane crashes could have lived. They die because they don’t move quickly enough or fail to move at all. They freeze in place.
The temptation is to suggest that what happened to the non-survivors on the Indian flight and on others is the human equivalent of “tonic immobility,” the freezing-in-position baby chicks do if the shadow of a hawk passes over them. In fact, according to Ben Sherwood, a former Rhodes Scholar at Oxford who has studied survival traits, humans do not have the same instinct as threatened baby chicks, although the process is similar. When human beings freeze in place, thereby endangering their own survival, their immobility is caused by a quite different confluence of factors.
“As your frontal lobes process the sight of an airplane wing on fire,” Sherwood wrote last year in his seminal Survivors’ Club, an examination of the traits and characteristics of people who don’t die when others – faced with the same challenging circumstances – do, “If you have no stored experience of a plane crash, your brain can’t find a match and gets stuck in a loop of trying and failing to come up with the right response. Hence: immobility.”
It’s not that the passengers who move fast and save their own lives don’t panic. They do – but their particular panic impels them into action, whereas the same panic causes others to sit, frozen into immobility.
Significantly, the indications are that this immobility is not caused by failure to grasp the dire consequences of what’s going on.
“On the contrary, [the immobile passenger] knows that if nothing is done, severe pain and even death will probably occur – but still he does nothing,” says Daniel Johnson, an aviation safety expert.
The bottom line seems to be that if your brain locks up in response to an overload of unprecedented information, you’re likely to wait for instructions and respond only to external leadership rather than get the hell out of the burning fuselage in the few seconds available to you. This may be complicated by the attitude you had before the flight. If you believe your chances of getting out alive from a plane crash are somewhere between slim and non-existent, then you don’t pay attention when the flight attendant goes through the safety palaver at the outset, you don’t crane your neck to establish where the emergency exit nearest you is and you don’t read the safety leaflet in the seat pocket in front of you.
If your fatalism is complicated by terror, you may anaesthetise yourself with alcohol or knock yourself out with a sleeping pill or Dramamine.
In the event of a crash, therefore, your capacity to cope is demonstrably reduced by lack of information complicated by being drunk, asleep or chemically restrained. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t sleep on a flight. It just means being awake, alert and informed during the first three minutes of a flight and the last eight. That’s the danger time. During those periods is when eight out of 10 air accidents happen.
The information necessary to survive an air crash has to be internalised. Research indicates that even when people have glanced around them to locate the emergency exit nearest them, that information doesn’t necessarily lock itself into their short-term memory, so that in the unlikely event of a crash, with a plane filling with smoke, they may not be able to locate the exit they thought they had “learned.”
Survival experts say that instead of reading the newspaper or the menu at the beginning of a flight, you’re better off to memorise precisely how many seat backs separate you from your nearest exit.
If something goes wrong, you need to take intelligent action, quickly.
“Of course, this idea runs contrary to the entire experience of going to the airport and flying these days,” Ben Sherwood admits. “Every step of the way, from ticketing to security to boarding, you’re told exactly what to do and when to do it. Too many passengers carry that passive mentality into a crash.”
Passivity doesn’t save lives on a troubled flight. The single most important survival factor is the capacity to respond quickly and calmly to the opportunity. The Indian flight, landing after torrential rain, overshot the runway and plunged into a ravine, breaking in two and bursting into flames.
But virtually the same thing happened to Air France Flight 358 going into Toronto five years ago in gusting winds and heavy rains.
“The plane overshot Runway 24 Left and plunged into a ravine before bursting into flames,” Sherwood writes. “Fire swept through the middle of the plane blocking some exits, but all 309 people on board escaped in 90 seconds.”
The very fact that air travel is such a phenomenally safe form of transport may contribute to the learned helplessness of passengers. But the fact is that, in the event of an accident, the odds on your coming out alive are greatly enhanced if you take charge of your safety.
Before you actually need to.
CONNECT WITH US TODAY
Be the first to know the latest news and updates
