Deadly stupidity during Aeroflot flight 1492 emergency evacuation

It seems very convenient to picture that rows 1-11 were just fine and rows 12+ were SOL. But it does seem just as likely that there's a shade of gray between the two - could row 12 have exited given more time? or did the smoke just form a wall at this point.

Of course, this is all based on zero information. If the accident investigators find a single body in the aisle rather than strapped into its chair, then it'd remain a worthy question.

But even if it turns out those in 12+ really were sealed by fate, I think it's still worth reminding people of every single time - because next time it could be you in row 12. "ignore the experts, it's probably fine" serves no-one.

I saw the footage and my first thought was exactly that of the OP. Tens of suitcases means tens of seconds delay. In an incident that gives you at most a few minutes for evacuation at least some of the dead are attributable to the actions of those carrying suitcases. That is criminal negligence in my book.

I now see another response quoting a Russian reponse indicating there was no congestion. Technically only the last survivor coming out could answer that question. For me, it seems strange that all the fatalities were instantaneous, while the survivors were unhindered. I'd imagine that with a broken up fuselage but not with a unbroken fuselage on fire. Perhaps the OP is overly emotional, but it's emotion pointing to something that is clearly wrong: people value belongings wrongly in case of serious accidents and the training should help people cope with that. I once saw a video of people trying to get their backpacks in case of a flash flood. They did not survive. Your property is basicly worthless compared to you being alive. We should learn to extend that to other people in case of emergency.

To your own point anyone who stops and grabs carry-on from the overhead bins while the cabin is filling with smoke and anyone past row 12 is passed out is criminally stupid. I don’t care if it took 55 seconds or 12, it’s not okay.

How thrilled would you be if your grandmother died because someone couldn’t leave their laptop aboard?

Have you ever unboarded a plane? If so, you clearly remember that every single hand luggage item, every single person on the isle causes congestion, even those in business class, right? I think it is impossible to state that "just the hand items that did not cause congestion were taken".

Further, was there a magic curtain between the areas of the plane that were unaffected from smoke and fire, and the affected parts? Fire and smoke spread, right? If not, at least some passengers were catched in fire and smoke after the plane had landed. Some of these passengers might have been able to escape, given an open isle. Only considering the opposite (unlikely case) is ignorant.

The ones taking luggage with them most certainly slowed down the process and caused a jam.

Once you stop in the isle, drag a luggage item down the isle and down an emergency ramp, you slow down the process. Unless somebody behind you is also causing a jam, you are directly to blame.

There is video on YouTube from a passenger, showing the left engine spewing out massive flames, apparently before the first contact with the ground - the plane is speeding forward at a stable angle.

> Yet, TFA's author is smearing people as "stupid" and 100% certain it was the stupid luggage people.

In the other videos you can clearly see passengers going down the emergency slide with bags in hand. One passenger carries a bag so heavy it bends the slide halfway through and violently hits the ground - how is that not stupid?

"This person" (Patrick Smith) did read up on it but more importantly is a senior pilot and from even before then an aviation nerd. I've been reading him for more than a decade and he's pretty smart and thoughtful. It's unusual for him to comment quickly which implies he does see something to say.

>> If indeed lightning touched off a fire aboard Aeroflot 1492, this would be highly unusual

> No, the lightning did not set off a fire. There was no fire until it landed. See Wikipedia Aeroflot 1492.

And indeed that's what he says: "[the claim is the the plane was on fire due to lightning but] it appears the plane touched down rather violently, resulting in the subsequent fire and crash. Planes are designed to withstand lightning strikes (see below), and almost never do they cause serious problems." (emphasis mine).

- Superjet cannot dump fuel

- Due to its weight the landing gear collapsed puncturing the wings

- The sparks from sliding on its engines ignited the fuel

...

Ripley searches for patterns in human behavior by interviewing hundreds of people who lived through catastrophes. Quick-witted survivors are surprisingly anomalous. One fellow who made it through a horrific aircraft disaster in 1977 happened to be sitting on the runway reading an in-flight safety instruction card when another plane crashed into his. He grabbed his wife, leapt through a hole in the fuselage, and turned to see his fellow passengers remaining docilely in their seats, immobile. Most of them died within minutes as fire swept through the wreckage.

...

The author concludes that all of us undergo a three-stage process when we find ourselves in mortal peril: denial, deliberation and the "decisive moment," during which the survivor buckles down and acts. The trick, she says, may be to understand our instincts, which, in a crisis, may betray us. """

https://www.npr.org/2008/07/22/92616679/identifying-who-surv...

Similarly, attributing crashes to "pilot error" is an obsolete and unproductive excuse.

- Agent K

Tangent, is that about focus & presence of mind or the knob getting hot? Much easier to push open a hot latch with your clothed shoulder than to turn a red-hot knob.

All your shit can be replaced. Lifes, which depend on seconds because pathes are blocked by passengers grabbing their luggage or by dropped luggage, cannot.

Now, imagine emergency evacuation situation. Most people will gladly dump the luggage, laptops etc., but would you leave the plane, knowing that your wife, kids, mother-in-law (maybe not a good example) are few rows behind and you are not sure if they are Ok. No, you will stay, trying to help them and create congestion.

Unfortunately, it will take an accident listing this type of "stupid" behavior as contributing cause for fatalities, in order for legislation to prevent the moron MBAs that decided to monetize their seats, extorting people to pay more so that they can sit together, to stop doing this.

And for what it’s worth, I use a backpack, so it’s often stored at my feet due to locker space pseudo reserved for hard cases.

this is not exculpating the behavior of course, but highlights something has changed in this area at least.

it's likely that this will result in the overhead containers having locks that are engaged for as long as the slides are armed.

Teaching will help only a little, at best. You would have to train passengers.

The more they’re under stress, the harder it is for untrained passengers to deviate from their standard “leave a plane” program. That includes taking one’s luggage and waiting for other passengers.

And yes, that applies to the life vests instructions, too. Advantage there is, that if you need those, chances are you’ll have minutes to prepare (but often, passengers still will make the mistake of opening them while inside the plane)

That depends on the aircraft type though. Helicopter passengers that are traveling over large bodies of water (e.g. offshore platform workers) are usually required to go through emergency training. In many jurisdictions that includes escaping a sinking helicopter in a (physical) simulator, and that's a rather unpleasant procedure, to put it mildly.

Yes. For me, that's really too much, if there's an alternative that's much quicker to check in (online), must quicker at arrival, doesn't have the risk of losing your luggage, and (in today's world) much cheaper as well.

We make it a point in our family to be able to do all our travel with carry-ons only, even if it's a multi-week trip to the other side of the world.

The last 2 times we checked in our luggage, part of the luggage did not arrive. If you have a carefully orchestrated vacation going from one place to the next, that can be a huge hassle.

Yes, because the airlines I usually fly with have a single manned desk for check-ins, so whenever I fly with anything to check I literally have to add 60-90 minutes just for standing in a queue to check it in. It's obscene. So I'd rather travel "light" and fit everything I need in a bag that's allowed on board and go straight through departures. And then of course there are things I wouldn't ever check in - my laptop and camera - so they need to come with me on-board anyway.

Picking up bags at the carousel is another matter. That can take significant time. That is a legitimate concern, even though I personally choose otherwise. I bought a decent bag and pack it properly, so I've never had a problem with damage (~30 trips and still going strong). I've had my bag delayed twice, once for more than a day. There are tradeoffs, but mostly I think people act selfishly by trying to save themselves a few bucks and a few minutes. It's a Prisoners' Dilemma kind of thing. Those are individually rational decisions, but when everyone makes the same decision it ends up being worse for everyone.

I put my foot down when people ask for this. I paid to check my baggage in so I can enjoy the free space under the seat in front of me. This tiny backpack is my carry on. People who want to us that space for their giant bag can go get bent.

They will gate-check stuff for free at least. They should make it a policy, under a certain weight free checked luggage at the ticket counter.

And for a slightly different perspective, here are some comments from Christine Negroni, aviation safety journalist and author of the Flying Lessons blog:

Like you, I found myself shaking my head when I saw the videos or read reports of people taking their carry on luggage off the plane. Then I interviewed a passenger on Asiana 214 [the 2013 crash-landing of a 777 in San Francisco] who had done so and was surprised by his explanation. He told me that when the plane came to a stop and the evacuation began, he acted by habit in gathering his things and only afterward did he realize what he was doing. So I think we cannot discount the effect of altered state of consciousness as playing a role in this behavior. You may have read about this as a form of “negative panic.”

Which may lead to a revision of Hanlon’s razor:

”Never attribute to stupidity that which can be adequately explained by indifference.”

if you talk in terms of "proof" the videos tell there was no fire visible before the third bounce.

sure it's more likely that there was no fire as opposed to a contained fire, but you need to split what video proves and what video suggests.

After all, it's completely understandable to be thinking only of oneself in a high-stress, unexpected, and possibly life-threatening circumstance. Including brief supportive reasoning reminding people of others' safety might have positive effects.

For example, on certain aircraft models with limited OH space, a number of luggage OH bins - especially towards the extreme ends of the cabins as that is where the FA stations are - store emergency equipment as well.

https://i2.wp.com/thepointsguy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/1... - an extreme example on Delta to prove the point, usually they store smaller emergency items.

If you decide to lock the bins, then either you have to sacrifice OH space and reconfigure the bins to move the emergency equipment to exclusive bins, re-certify the plane (as it involves emergency equipment) and re-train cabin crew to never store any emergency gear in the other bins. Or, keep the bin configuration as it is, but don't lock the ones storing emergency equipment while you lock the others, and face a situation where pax in the extreme ends of the cabins - where emergency exits happen to be as well - can still get their stuff, which may encourage others to pry their bins open and lose a lot of time.

Yes, even for something with a single pilot and no apparent fire they would usually have airport fire crews chase the emergency plane at an airport which has such things. Unless the pilots explicitly say they need something else e.g. "we have a woman with a heart attack we need paramedics to meet us".

You'll hear on radio recordings the fire crew being told which plane is "theirs" and authorised to enter the runway which is otherwise off limits to ground vehicles. Something like "Emergency plane is number one for two six left. Fire Two you are Cleared to follow them onto two six left".

More general about the briefings: The explanation of the life vest seems to take most of the time. I often wonder how many airplane accidents involved landing on water, making that instruction worth having every single time. Maybe someone knows ?

Compare to airline seat belts: the reason they always have that demonstration at the start of the flight about them is because there have been cases where people literally forgot how the seatbelt worked in an emergency situation, didn't have the mental coherency available to figure it out again, and kept trying to push at the side of it where the latch release would be in a car.

A better legal approach would be to place limits on carry-on luggage in the first place, so that the physical possibility of delaying evacuations with it is removed.

What I did find interesting though, were the other side effects I hadn't considered. Time taken actually picking up your bag, most people will justify that away to themselves. Clogging up the aisle, most people seem to think that's something other people do.

Time wasted arguing with the flight attendant when they try to persuade you that your bag could damage the slide? Where does the inevitable pile of bags go if the flight attendants start winning that argument? One report had that pile formed in front of a cockpit door. Another had that pile form in front of the off-side exit which should have been otherwise usable.

(and only one of these points would be addressed by wider aisles!)

I do find myself speculating whether the modern atmosphere of everyone knowing better than the experts compounds the issue.

Aisles aren't going to become much wider - it's always a compromise of convenience and safety in the extremely unlikely event of evacuation vs. cost and also the now ever-more prevalent concern about co2 emissions cause by reduced number of seats.

Perhaps the first thing to do is have a LOUD intercom when evacuating: "do not take any luggage, just get out". This is already emphasized in the routine pre-flight security show, but people don't pay much attention.

So yes - it does cost that much to increase space, and reducing passenger loads would lead to significant losses.

By any reasonable metric, including passenger miles and total passenger numbers, accidents are incredibly rare compared to other transport modes.

The way to deal with the problem is to make crashes and fires even less likely, not to expect untrained panicking passengers to deal rationally or intelligently with a situation they've never experienced.

It's a run for your life at that point.

Perhaps people should be taught that aircrafts are dictatorships. The crew of a ship has legal authority over passengers. The politely-spoken comment, "federal law mandates that you follow crew member instructions" in their 5 minute briefing doesn't seem to stick out to anyone.