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Comment by steveBK123 | Hacker News Reader

This is why you follow cabin crew instructions and DO NOT CARRY YOUR LUGGAGE out of the aircraft in an emergency. Your luggage is not worth more than a fellow passengers life.

Contrast this with evacuation footage of western passenger planes..

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Indeed. It’s a good idea to keep your passport and some small USB drives (password database, Linux image for installation on a new laptop, etc.) on your person instead of in your luggage when you fly.

>password database, Linux image for installation on a new laptop

Heh. Imagine surviving a plane crash. Everyone is busy calling their loved ones, and I'm busy setting up my new Linux distribution on a laptop bought in duty free, using the Linux image in my pocket.

After six hours trying to get the touchpad working you're wishing you'd died in the crash.

From what info are you assuming that no one did? A middle school boy who was on the plane said "荷物を取り出そうという人もいた"[0], "there were also people who tried to get their luggage".

[0] https://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/html/20240102/k10014307191000.ht...

I like to think that in a real emergency (crash landing, fire visible outside, smoke entering the cabin) survival instinct will kick in and people will just GTFO without worrying about luggage. The videos I've seen of people evacuating with luggage seem a little less serious. That said, an evacuation is always serious. People often do get hurt coming down those slides so the crew only order an evacuation if they think it outweighs the risk of staying put and waiting for help.

I'd like to think so but there have been plenty of US incidents of people evacuating for an engine on fire with baggage in tow.

If you are evacuating out the door on a slide, something is quite serious. The trained professionals telling you to leave your baggage behind have more information than passengers in that regard. That is why they decided to deploy the slides.

Just because one can't see a fire doesn't mean there isn't an engine fire on the other side, or a fuel leak or.. etc. Planes are pretty big, you can't see/smell everything from your seat/window.

I mean here's some right here of smoking planes with evacuees hauling even wheelies..

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10055329/Spirit-Air...

https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/red-pla...

> in a real emergency (crash landing, fire visible outside, smoke entering the cabin) survival instinct will kick in and people will just GTFO without worrying about luggage

Unfortunately, that's not always the case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeroflot_Flight_1492#Evacuatio...

Ok? What you linked to, which is a single paragraph, does not provide any proof for your claim. It says there was some speculation that people retrieving luggage caused delay, but state media and law enforcement are on record as saying there's no evidence that it had any effect, as well as there being a witness saying it had no effect.

The claim was simply that passengers will still reach for luggage even in an incident as serious as fire in the cabin. That was the case in this example, and the others linked by steveBK

Please read my comment again; I made no such claim.

GP said they could not imagine anybody even worrying about their language in a severe crash, yet in the case of Aeroflot 1492, people definitely did retrieve theirs:

> [...] prompted by video footage showing passengers leaving the plane with luggage in hand [...]

Members of my family require medication (epipen, some various pills), and I keep that along with a flashlight (in case I need to administer in pitch black) in a small haversack. I would probably try to take that with me, as I would hate to survive the crash but then have a fatal medical event in the aftermath and not have the tools. I do feel conflicted since the no luggage mantra has been drilled in for decades.

If the medical condition is so dire that medicine must be kept on hand then it should be in your pockets, not tucked away in luggage.

What is the probability of being stung by a bee or eating a bag of nuts between your seat, the slide, and the ambulances rushing to the scene to rescue people?

Otherwise by this logic, just about everyone has a reason to self-justify needing to get into their luggage in an emergency evacuation event.

Target to evacuate planes in an emergency is 90 seconds. Contrast with regular deplaning with luggage which takes upwards of 15 minutes. So the plane must evacuate at 10x speed in order to save lives.

I’m guessing you aren’t carrying an epi regularly — they seem likely to be broken if in my pocket. It’s not a pocket sized form factor.

The bag I have is about the size of two croissants — I keep it under seat in front of me or in my lap.

But this topic has inspired me to improve my process, so I would like to find a money belt or shoulder holster style bag to carry meds and epi while traveling. Basically body hugging.

Any help in finding something that isn’t from Temu, or some random drop shipper? I found one eagle creek bag but would prefer a shoulder style?

Isn't an epi pen a very common medicine, which is available pretty much worldwide?

It’s hard to imagine a survivable emergency landing that doesn’t also include hordes of ambulances and emergency personnel descending upon it.

>> I would probably try to take that with me, as I would hate to survive the crash but then have a fatal medical event in the aftermath and not have the tools.

But you might just die in the fire yourself, prioritizing a hypothetical emergency over a real one. There would also be plenty of medical personnel present once you get off the plane, they probably won't let you leave the scene without talking to one.

It's fine to take something small you can carry in one hand/keep with you through the whole flight without it being a problem. It's the luggage in the overhead baggage compartments that needs to be abandoned.

> But you might just die in the fire yourself, prioritizing a hypothetical emergency over a real one

The Two Failure Fallacy is a fatal flaw of human reasoning. It's almost never correct to engineer anything on the assumption of two bad things happening simultaneously. You do your analysis based on individual/uncorrelated failure modes. And only then do you make design choices (c.f. "defense in depth", "redundancy", etc...) about how much the interactions overlap and what the tradeoffs are.

In this case, duh. Positing that emergency medical personnel are somehow unable to handle an allergy attack is silly.

Well my problem is the conditions of an airline crash (the smoke, extreme heat, etc) are triggers for our disease. It’s not a simple as a peanut allergy where you just avoid eating a certain food.

I’m not convinced that medical personnel would be on hand that quickly for all emergency landings — sure if you are at a major airport. But they may not notice someone who collapsed after being triaged away from the more severely injured.

>> You do your analysis based on individual/uncorrelated failure modes.

May I introduce you to Fault Tree Analysis? NUREG 0492

https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/nuregs/staff/...

One result of that is to show that there are no double failures with common cause, rather than just assuming that to be true.

If you're in the market for a real HN style reply, actually, almost every aviation disaster involves two or more things happening the wrong way simultaneously. Usually more than five.

Which is sort of the exception that proves the rule though, isn't it? Aviation is outrageously safe, such that all the low hanging fruit has long since been picked and they're finally cleaning up the uncorrelated failures.

Other areas of engineering aren't nearly so advanced, c.f. Fukushima, which happened because of the converse failure: the designers treated two failures (power grid failure and flooded backup generators) as uncorrelated and independent when they weren't (because tsunamis follow earthquakes).

Those drugs are still available outside of your luggage. Your need for that stuff is convenience. Everybody else on the flight would prefer to have their luggage too.

You need to break the rules, risk others lives, and grab your carryon in an airport in a major city for an epipen? How many hospitals, ambulances, and first aid stations are within 5k of you would you guess?

Ok, I watched a video somebody else linked.

People don't act at all the same after getting crashed into by another plane, barely making it to the ground in a plane filled with smoke and fire, as they do when those things haven't happened?

You don't say.

Would you say it's a good idea to throw yourself tumbling down the emergency slide and sprint away from the plane if those things hadn't happened?

This is not even a remotely helpful comment.

>> Your luggage is not worth more than a fellow passengers life.

I was going to say a major narcissist would disagree, but they probably don't have many of those in Japan. And then you followed up:

>> Contrast this with evacuation footage of western passenger planes..

Is that for real? It would not surprise me, but is there documentation of this difference in deplaning? Or other areas?

Yes

https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/red-pla...

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10055329/Spirit-Air...

https://nypost.com/2023/03/09/plane-passengers-slammed-for-g...

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