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It seems a little disingenuous to say the evacuation was completed in 55 seconds. Over half the passengers perished - the evacuation was never completed. I think it'd be accurate to say there was a survivable window of 55 seconds, and 37 people managed to deplane in that time.

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.

Please, before I rush to judgement, in what way does taking a suitcase even by a single individual not create a few seconds lost for those further down the line?

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.

> few minutes for evacuation

The evacuation was completed in 55 seconds. People in the back were stranded/unconscious/buckled-up before the plane even stopped. The eyewitness reported (see links in my post) he had to _crawl on all fours_ out of the plane through thick smoke through a completely clear aisle. People with bags were the ones sitting immediately in the first few rows, they did not cause a congestion.

I would be pissed off as anyone if luggage grabbers killed someone, but it seems they weren't the "deadly stupidity" here? I mean, the dude just wrote the whole pompous blog post with a flashy title off an unlikely rumor?

Well the OP kind of did worse. It's just a repost of the exact same text in earlier incidents.

The unlikely rumor was spread on reddit as a fact for days. In fact I believed it until I saw further accounts and discussion.

Admittedly, the real stupidity here is attributed to ME. I really need to stop caring about details/"news" before some time has passed to filter out the rumors and the garbage that people produce on places like reddit.

> I would be pissed off as anyone if luggage grabbers killed someone, but it seems they weren't the "deadly stupidity" here? I mean, the dude just wrote the whole pompous blog post with a flashy title off an unlikely rumor?

This is such flawed thinking statistically. It really doesn't matter if the luggage killed somebody here or not, it's faster to get out of the plane without luggage and there's no way to tell how fast the plane is burning from inside.

Grabbing luggage put their fellow passengers, even it was for one second, in the hands of fate. I don't know whether it killed any extra people or not, but it was deadly stupidity regardless.

> luggage grabbers killed someone

you are as well making completely unsubstantiated claims and only the final investigation will correctly asses the casualty from the fire and the casualty from the evacuation delay.

like, what about the guys crawling behind that last one? any passenger which suffocated unbuckled was direct result of the jam at the beginning, however few second it might have been, each single second could have been one crawler more managing to get to the front before suffocation.

> in 55 seconds

well yeah but only half passenger evacuated, and the plane was only 70% full. you can't just claim the timing was good like that, in a vacuum.

> he had to _crawl on all fours_ out of the plane through thick smoke

Individual smoke hoods were tested in the 1980s for such eventualities but weren't adopted for cost reasons.

> People with bags [...]

SHOULD NOT HAVE HAD THEIR BAGS. END OF STORY.

You say yourself the last survivor existed after 55 seconds. Did bag carriers cause even a two second delay? Could one extra person have crawled out from the smoke before succumbing? Perhaps that 12 year old girl?

You (and I mean anyone but if you fly I literally mean you) should not be making these sort of calculations when deciding to carry or not carry. Do not carry. Exit.

A quote from the last survivor off the plane says that the aisle in front of them was completely clear as they left. In other words, any delays that might have happened weren't actually enough to harm or kill anyone in and of themselves.

I don't follow; that may mean nobody left their bags sitting in the aisle, but surely it doesn't mean there weren't delays. I've often had to wait upwards of five minutes to deplane at the end of a flight while other passengers grab their belongings, despite the aisle being clear. Bags absolutely slow things down.

(Unless that survivor meant the aisle was free from other passengers, but that ... seems like an unlikely interpretation.)

Or someone ahead of there spent several seconds pushing bags out of the aisle, and not everyone realized the speed of evacuation was being determined by obstructions. Or, not every piece of luggage causes the same slowdown, and the first piece of luggage with significant delay caused the choke point for all of those who didn't make it out. Or a dozen other scenarios. We just don't know.

90% of highway traffic jams I drive through end up having no visible cause. That doesn't mean that there was never anything in the road causing a slowdown.

"Technically only the last survivor coming out could answer that question"

And last survivor witnessed exactly this - quick evacuation without any issues with the luggage.

"people value belongings wrongly in case of serious accidents"

this catastrophe shows exactly opposite.

Could you link to a source for that claim?

https://meduza.io/feature/2019/05/07/ya-shel-poslednim-za-mn...

that article says survivor waited and asked his wife to wait instead of rushing to the exit because expected crowd near the exit.

He also said he waited until exit will be freed from others "Я уже не могу сказать, сколько мы ждали, пока проход освободится".

не пизди, не просил он жену ждать. Про жену он пишет только "толкнул вперёд". Про "сколько мы ждали" он говорит лишь "время относительно, не могу точно оценить. Но я не могу сказать, что что-то тормозило эвакуацию".

exact citation from the article where he said what I described above: "она пыталась встать и побежать, но я сказал сесть, потому что ждал, что из-за паники в проходе начнется давка."

No

Мы с женой оставались на местах после удара — она пыталась встать и побежать, но я сказал сесть, потому что ждал, что из-за паники в проходе начнется давка.

Мало ли, кто чего ждал. Важно, что случилось по факту.

I wonder if its worth configuring baggage storage as lockable in the event of emergency exits being deployed?

Though knowing our luck, that will probably make it worse as people try to force the handles/locks.

Even if it does, we know full well from decades of medical and aerospace disaster research that these problems can only be treated if they are handled as systemic and non-malicious. Punishing these people will make it harder to learn from what happened here, and make it harder to prevent these sorts of disasters in the future.

We know people act irrationally or apathetically in disasters. The only way to fix it is to design systems around peoples' inherent weaknesses. You can't go around punishing these people after the fact, we need to understand why they acted how they did and how we can stop it from happening in the future.

> We know people act irrationally or apathetically in disasters.

This, times a million.

Brains don't work right sometimes, and you fixate on weird things, shut down, or fall into patterns that aren't useful in the situation in question. Afterwards, you'll be surprised by your behavior, shocked, embarrassed, and ashamed. Sometimes your behavior will seem brave to an outside observer, sometimes it will seem shameful, sometimes inane, but it's the same I-don't-understand-what's-happening disaster fugue state from the inside while it's happening.

I'd lay odds that for most of those people getting off the plane, it wasn't even any sort of "I need my stuff! It might get damaged!" thinking. From the inside of their head, they were getting off the airplane. When you get off the airplane, you put on your coat and grab your bag. What else would you do? You never leave your stuff on the airplane. When you are in a disaster and your brain shuts down, you fall into that sort of routine, even if it is the wrong thing to do in that situation.

> we need to understand why they acted how they did and how we can stop it from happening in the future.

I agree, but a deterrent might be part of a strategy to improve passengers behavior in such situations. "In case of evac, leave your bags or you'll get sued" might help a few people remember this line in the safety video. I'd obviously only advocate for something like this if studies show it to be effective.

I doubt you'll find any studies that show this to be effective.

And, arresting someone who just survived a plane crash who barely escaped a situation they didn't cause with their life just because they brought their purse with them is going to get ugly really fast.

I agree, the solution is to design better evacuation systems. That might include preventing people from bringing carry on luggage larger than a purse or briefcase.

I don't get all this posts defending the (and I want to fully repeat the articles original wording) STUPID behavior of these people.

Yes agreed, if it really didn't delay no blame for causing any loss of life no blame should have been put on them, media coming too quick to lurid headlines is a common bad thing, bad journalism, true.

But this does not matter at all here WTF? Even if this behavior did not cause any death, or delay, it is just outright stupid.

It still risked other passenger's lives (no one can judge in this situation by "looking at the aisle" if it is save trying to get your luggage or not), it still risked hurting other people during evacuation, it still risked damaging the slide, it still ignored the safety instructions and the stewardess shouting at the people to get the fuck out, it still just is an ultra egoistic asshole move trying to save your belongings.

And btw I also don't get the defense of "people act irrationally or apathetically in disasters". Your most basic natural instinct is to flee a life endangering situation, the second thing that can happen is an apathetic reaction, but apathetic reaction != trying to save your belongings while a plane is burning. Anyone who tries to fetch and carry their luggage while the stewardess is shouting at you to get out is just trying to save their very belongings, and not reacting irrational or apathetic. Unfortunately stupidity and egoism is also human nature, but still it is just this and not irrationality or apathy, this behavior is not defendable and just outright stupid.

I also don't get the downplay of "people just carrying a purse"... please watch the footage, you can see a roll-aboard.

Anyone getting off the plane with a carry-on should be charged with negligent homicide or similar. 55 seconds vs 45 vs 35 could be the different between 40 dead and 42 or 44. One life matters, your laptop does not. Only one of these things can be restored from iCloud. Leave. Your. Bags. On. The. Plane. This apologism has to stop. Other than that very little you said is disrupted by the author — they themselves point out it’d be very unlikely the fire started in the air. They are a pilot after all.

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?

Should they?

There is evidence in psychology studies about human reaction to catastrophes such as this. People often default to habitual behavior, possibly because active decision making may be "disabled" as responsible regions of the brain get overwhelmed.

It reaches an extent where people are entirely incapable of unbuckling their seatbelts because a more common and therefore default mechanism for unbuckling is the one you would use in your car. And that works entirely different from the ones in planes.

https://consumerist.com/2016/07/12/why-are-there-seatbelt-de...

Yeah, they should be charged. The psychological studies you cite could then be entered by the defence and taken into account by the judge.

I'm reading this comment and I'm thinking : you're absolutely right, they should be!

Yet. I have been in plane on fire and I did grab my backpack.. I didn't really act consciously, and somehow I had rationalized the order "everyone, get out now!" as some kind of random evacuation exercises. (European in my teens back then and one of my first flights)

> Yet. I have been in plane on fire

Commercial? What happened?

But maybe a few public court cases (even if everybody was acquitted in the end) would cause some people to remember not to grab the bags in the next accident.

Maybe instead of pointless court cases, lots of publicity about correct behavior for the same effect.

>Should they?

Probably not for the reasons you mentioned.

That doesn't mean it's not a damn good thing to say if you want to be popular on the internet. Hard-line opinions about Bad Things(TM) always win virtue points regardless of whether or not those opinions are well informed.

This is more the truth IMO. They aren't consciously being jerks because they don't have time to have those kinds of thoughts. Which means that throwing criminal charges around months later won't help anything. The only way to change such behavior would be for people to practice serious everything's-on-fire drop-everything-and-run-NOW evacuations regularly. I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for that to happen.

Okay, maybe having a short preflight safety briefing that people would actually pay attention to and that told people that would help. Or maybe just scare the crap out of everyone.

Really? What about people paking in handicapped space? Is this because they don't have time to think clearly, or is it because they only carr about themselves? Why would people be different when exiting a plane, as when shopping?

When shopping, you're not in a smoke-filled tube with alarms blaring while people shout at you.

My point exactly. It's not terror that's the problem. It's people.

My post doesn't support your point at all, and is in fact entirely about the terror inherent in one situation and not the other.

But why would people behave better when under extreme stress vs. under zero stress.

Uhh that has absolutely nothing to do with this situation. What's the point in bringing it up?

My point is that people in unfamiliar situations, particularly stressful and panicked ones, tend to stop thinking and revert to familiar behaviors. For most people, that's gathering their stuff before leaving. Their behavior will never change based on legal penalties applied months later. To get them to behave differently, they have to practice the different behavior beforehand.

Parking is a normal, common activity with no reasonable expectation of panic or stress. People have plenty of time to think about what they're doing. That's why legal penalties are an effective deterrent. I have no idea what would lead you to believe that the situations are comparable.

It would be terribly difficult for the prosecutor to prove that "but for" the actions of the defendant another person died.

Secondly, I find it hard to believe that anyone who has had to act in moments as extreme as this would have such a harsh view of others who had never been in such a situation.

I spent a good portion of my adult life in extreme situations and I can tell you people do not operate with their conscious minds. They do not really "make choices", things just happen. This is why training is so important for people who might encounter extreme situations.

Please be more gracious to these people.

It's worth noting that the reason many people take their baggage with them is because airlines often can't be trusted to handle it. Bags get lost, damaged, delayed on reclaim, etc, and they charge extra.

If those problems were solved, airlines could forbid taking anything with you to the cabin with other passengers and evacuation would be easier.

Because any of the mentioned problems matter in the case of an emergency where people's lives are in danger.

If a airplane crashes, all of the baggage is confiscated whether you took it off the plane or not.

Do you really think that something happens to bring down a plane and they just let the people who took their baggage off the plane during the emergency to just go home with their baggage? I can't believe this has to be explained to anyone.

The post you're responding to is talking about the general case of non-emergency travel situations, which would if less poorly handled by airlines, allow for fewer complications in the specific case of emergencies.

The fire started on the ground.

Hm. Technically, can we even say the evacuation was "completed" when a considerable amount of passengers never left the plane alive?

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.

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

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?

The plane bounced 3 times and the flames erupted on the second or third bounce: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9_xh7aK2No

I don't know what video you are referring to, but the ones I've seen from the inside look like the plane is taxiing after the third bounce, which likely caused the fuel leak and the whole fire.

Grabbing bags is stupid, here in this case people died for a different reason.

Bags risk damage to the slide, which could prevent passengers from using them, as well as causing physical impact injuries to passengers below. There is no excuse.

exactly. "but this one time nothing happened" is just sloppy complacency

there was this article on the hn front page not longer than a month ago about this very issue https://fastjetperformance.com/podcasts/how-i-almost-destroy...

> One passenger carries a bag so heavy it bends the slide halfway through and violently hits the ground

Not to discount the stupidity involved in holding onto one's bags (which I absolutely agree is absurd, whether it's attributable to simple human nature or not), but that makes it sound like the slide was defective as well. Even a very heavy carry-on is relatively modest compared to the weight of the person carrying it.

> This person did not bother to read anything about the incident

"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).

A few things played a significant role:

- 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

Not being able to dump fuel seems like a pretty serious design flaw.

There are many common aircraft that can't dump fuel.

Most can't. Including the 737.

Reading a BBC piece on it, it looks like the rear emergency doors were stuck also https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-48175029

The rear outside was engulfed in flames, exiting there would not have helped.

Exactly. The "luggage people" might have even saved some lifes. "According to a witness some baggage fell from overhead compartments during the hard landing and passengers removed them in order to free the passage." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeroflot_Flight_1492 https://www.newsru.com/russia/11may2019/luggage.html