How Japan Airlines crew led 367 passengers to safety from a burning plane | Hacker News Reader

How Japan Airlines crew led 367 passengers to safety from a burning plane

reuters.com

I am inclined to think that this exact same scenario featuring a plane full of not Japanese, but, say, Dutch, English, or Americans, would not have resulted in a full evacuation in 18 minutes; possibly with casualties. Obeying commands as a group in a high-pressure situation? That takes a lifetime of living in a culture where this is normal. A group of military passengers (any nationality) would probably have worked just as well.

(Not to say that Japanese culture is better, just that it happens to be very beneficial in this scenario.)

Maybe this is a good time for me to vent about exit row seating? I was recently on a holiday flight where an older couple walked very delicately up to the gate. When prompted, "are you able and willing to assist in the event of an emergency?" the lady immediately said "oh no, we can't..." and the guy says "well, there won't be an emergency, right?" To her credit, the crew member checking us in very sternly told him that his attitude was completely unacceptable and that their seats would be moved.

But it made me think: realistically, the only people sitting in exit rows should be reasonably fit 18-45 year olds in most cases (and I'd prefer men). Yet it's usually whoever has the most money/points/status to get the extra leg room.

/end rant

Is this US or EU or somewhere else? I have some experience in Europe.

I (male early thirties then) once was sat in an exit row (replaced with some other passenger) when flying EasyJet. As I understood then only because I seemed to be more fit to sit there.

Once travelling with Ryanair stewardess exclaimed that "oh no you will be sitting with a baby in an exit row". We said "no no we are sitting the row behind". She said "thanks god I thought I will need to rearrange passengers". Of course a baby in an exit row MUST be a big no no anywhere.

So I have a feeling that it is being looked quite seriously.

What, specifically, do you think requires a strong man in this case?

Airplane overwing exit doors come in two types. The ones that you fully detach and throw out, which weigh less than the average passenger's suitcase [1]. The larger and heavier ones are spring-assisted so you can literally open them with one hand while seated [2].

[1] https://youtu.be/RCFzEg-t_Bk?si=xACVKqIvakrrJnaT at 0:25

[2] https://youtu.be/ZW4xaHN1otE?si=rr0kHUzrRSXJY3Pr at 0:20

On the last plane I was, the door was 17kg and instructions said to pick it up, turn sideways, then throw away. I prefer strong men to do it when my life depends on it.

I googled if it was possible. It harder mid flight, but take offs or landing its much easier. I would rather we accept the fact this risk exists and take the necessary precaution of putting someone at the door that can more handle the situation than pretend it doesn't exist.

To me it seems the biggest dangers about exit doors are not accidents. But someone who snaps and wants to open the exit door during take off/landing where the outside air pressure is low enough to more easily open the door. In this kind of situation a strong man doesn't hurt.

You mean when the inside air pressure is low enough. Aircraft doors fit like a plug, held in by air pressure in the cabin. If you look when they are opened they all move inward first. This is why they can't be opened mid-flight.

At the point where they can be opened, the pressure differential is going to be so low that nothing bad is going to happen, other than maybe someone's bag in the exit row being blown out by the wind. Plus everyone should be strapped in at that point.

This happened just last year IIRC in Korea. Nothing was in serious danger (except maybe some travel schedules). A comment already described the mechanism and why that’s not really a thing to worry about.

unless the strong man is the one that wants to open the door.

i think i've heard of someone trying to open a door mid flight once though, so unless i'm poorly informed, let's not give the TSA ideas around mental health screenings before flights.

> fit 18-45 year olds in most cases

Anecdotally, I believe many airlines do this - it's happened to me a few times during check in where they've asked if I'd be OK with the emergency seat.

s/18-45 year olds//

s/(and I'd prefer men)//

Otherwise I agree. I have no problem with Stallone or Schwarzenegger in the exit rows. But realistically, they fly private jets or in first class.

Edit: Ageism and sexism are good, anti-ageism and feminism are bad! That effective accelerationist mindset has no room for the womenfolk or the senile!

Aeroflot Flight 1492 is a perfect example of this. Passengers were actively working to get carry-on bags down the emergency slide as 41 people were burning to death in the back of the plane.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeroflot_Flight_1492

https://www.flightglobal.com/analysis/analysis-superjet-fire...

Made for interesting reading. I think that it's possible that one more life could have been saved without those carry-on bags. That's a responsibility the passangers and crew both share.

The Russians seem to have an unusual attitude to human life, currently illustrated by the tens of thousands being killed in Ukraine for no particularly good reason. The reaction seems to be

>Putin urges Russian women to have ‘eight or more’ children... https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/vladimir-put...

rather than avoiding it all by going home and having a cup of tea or some such.

Russians are the very extreme example — we're much more individualistic and self-centered than Dutch, English, or Americans.

These must be two extremes of cultures. Russian and Japanese must be the very opposites in almost every way.

Counterexample https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_Airways_Flight_1549?wprov=s...

Edit: interestingly, the evacuation took about the same time in total, but in a river, not on land.

Arguably looking out the window and realizing they were in the Hudson River might have lead them to realize they weren't going to be swimming with their wheelie.

The U.S. is a very punitive society and I think if you were to find yourself in the tarmac after an evacuation holding onto your carry on, you’d at minimum be getting a large fine for disobeying a flight attendant and possibly more. Not being in the Hudson isn’t going to change the fact that you are ending up in the middle of nowhere once you are off the plane.

In such situations, people won’t think about that.

What I’ve read, the reason people taking their carry-on at least partly is because, when having to get out of a plane in a stressful situation, they won’t think “what shall I do now.”, but just activate their “deboard plane” program, and that involves getting their bags before getting out of the plane.

There have been many instances of people deplaning from an engine-on-fire plane in US, with luggage. Spirit, Southwest, and some Caribbean airlines in recent 2-3 years at the very least.

Then, the planes should be fitted with pilot-commanded overhead baggage locks.

The scenarios in which you want to lock the bins is precisely the scenarios where the locks are likely to fail - crashes.

It's already been reported JAL plane damage was bad enough that intercoms didn't work.

Can't lock them for the full flight, at most you can lock them during first/last 30min ascent/descent. But even there, many incidents begin in the air and precipitate an emergency landing. We will then add another item for the checklist (lock the bins) while they are supposed to be focussed on keeping the plane in the air and safely landing it?

So needless cost & complexity that will have maintenance costs, inconvenience costs.. and then have a high probability of failure in the one case it was designed for anyway.

Many problems are people problems and technology can't solve people.

With roughly half the number of passengers.

And twice as many working exits.

I have taken countless Delta and UA flights. I can attest 100%, had this scenarios happened on those flights, near death certainty for those passengers. 90sec from my years of observations not doable by ANY Delta or UA flights unless maybe small 737 with maybe a third full. Their crews and the type of passengers they have guarantee death in this kind of situation. Heck even if you give them 10 mins instead of 90sec, they still will not make it all out.

> Their crews...guarantee death in this kind of situation

I was recently on a UA flight where, maybe 15 seconds after takeoff, a flight attendant rushed out of her jumpseat to try to shield a passenger from a bag from an overhead bin that had just popped open.

n=1, but when it comes down to it in an emergency situation, I bet the flight crew takes their responsibilities very seriously.

I was going to say the same thing. This is the positive aspect of Japanese/East Asian culture. They give authority figures the benefit of the doubt and will listen to instructions.

Of course, this obedience to authority has a downside. In South Korea, when the Sewol ferry sank, the crew instructed the passengers to stay inside their rooms while they drank beer and abandoned ship. Many of the obedient passengers drowned. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_of_MV_Sewol

Flames shooting up around the plane after a collision have got to focus the mind of the passengers; so I guess it's hard to compare different incidents.

If they're close to the exit, it's clearly someone else's problem for those that aren't in our culture. If only they'd invested in their personal safety they wouldn't be burning to death and how else will they learn?

It comes to my mind the same scenario in Dubai. In the video you can see people leaving the plane with their luggage.

https://youtu.be/PyNVUXVhnAw

https://youtu.be/OvNT78ICJlg

British Airways flight 2276, 170 passengers and crew. 2 minutes 32 seconds.

>All occupants, including one lap child, and the flight and cabin crewmembers evacuated the airplane through the 1L, 1R, or 4L door slides. (The flight attendants estimated that only five passengers evacuated using the 1L door slide, which was subsequently blocked due to fire.) The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) obtained videos that showed that the evacuation was completed about 2 minutes 32 seconds after the captain's initial command to evacuate.

https://skybrary.aero/sites/default/files/bookshelf/4367.pdf

TWA Flight 843, 292 passengers and crew. "Less than two minutes"

>All of the flight attendants stated that the evacuation was completed in less than 2 minutes.

https://libraryonline.erau.edu/online-full-text/ntsb/aircraf...

Every time I read a comment about JaPaNeSe CuLtUrE I throw up in my mouth a little because was stationed in Japan for a total of three years and their culture is just as fucked as everyone else's... just in different ways.

I think that's reductive orientalism.

I don't know. I've lived in both the Netherlands and Japan, and studied the culture (and language) of the latter. In my experience, groups of Japanese people defer to authority in the case of an emergency with a minimum of fuss, where a group of Dutch would show much more hesitation, scepticism, and sometimes outright hostility in a similar situation.

You're welcome to call that reductive occidentalism.

As a group people from those cultures behave totally differently. I'm not judging either culture with this observation (although I can be quite critical about some aspects of both); it's a simple observable fact.

18 minutes seems like a hell of a long time to get out of a damn burning plane

I've never been to Japan but in the US people are standing and ready to exit as soon as the plane docks to the airport so I can imagine people running for their lives in this scenario.

5 minutes at most would seem more understandable

People running for their lives likely will increase the time to get everybody out.

Two people might try to get out of an exit door simultaneously, or someone might push over another passenger to get to the exit door, making those behind them trip over the fallen passenger, etc.

Curious how high this was upvoted with no evidence. Would imply unconscious bias within HN readership of Japanese as obedient.

It could be that most of the passengers are Japanese so it's largely cultural (I understand some of the passengers might be non-Japanese).

I can't imagine people in my country following these 3 critical instructions: don't panic, orderly exit, and don't take carry-on items.

The standard is 90 seconds, not 18 minutes = 1080 seconds. They were very lucky the fire took its time.

Yes, it's necessary to shut down the engines where possible (not this case).

Cabin crew waiting to confer with flight crew can waste precious seconds.

In this case, we may be dealing with smoke inhalation injuries.

Yeah: I think it's 18 minutes from the plane touching down the other plane, not the plane standing still... But still: it's very, very, very long.

With 3 safe exits (out of 8 apparently), and 367 passengers+crew, that's 123 passenger per exit. 18 minutes means 7 passenger per minute per exit.

How the heck do you need ten seconds per passenger to hop on the slide? Even the videos from this crash show a much higher throughput.

Could it be that a significant portion of the passengers were evacuated quickly, but the last few might have taken a while? I assume someone with reduced mobility/requiring a wheelchair will take a while to evacuate. And if there are more of them than flight attendants, I wouldn't be surprised if it takes that long.

From the article:

”The A350-900 was certified for a full load of up to 440 passengers to be evacuated within 90 seconds with only half of the exits usable.

It was not immediately clear what portion of the 18-minute operation was spent physically getting passengers down slides”

The idea why cabin crew shall check with the flight deck before evacuating is so that a single flight attended might not have the full picture and inadvertently open a door close to a fire or similar.

Which could severely reduce the time the airframe can withstand fire.

The idea is to gain some situational awareness and only open those doors clear of obvious risks. The flight deck has for example access to ATC which can give them additional outside information that the flight attendants don’t have.

Seems that an overriding "lock all overhead storage" mechanism and control in the cockpit would be useful in these situations. Forced compliance would save lives. Granted some stow baggage under the seats, but I think an override would still be beneficial.

It's easy to imagine that the same person who's willing to ignore explicit instructions and clearly put others at risk, is going to be willing to spend extra time struggling to open a locked container.

This isn't going to be a "gave it a tug, didn't open, give up and move on" situation.

I think if there is a situation when "one tug and give up" happens, this is it.

Which means running extra wires, and special locking hardware, all of which can break so calls for additional maintenance.

And when it does break, you've got people in the aisle wanting their carry-ons - which may include medicine or other essential items - so you need to train the cabin crew on how to manage that situation.

If power goes out in-flight, which does happen, do the storage bins stay locked, or do they fail-safe to unlocked? Is there a manual override for when that medicine is really needed?

Consider Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571, "the Miracle of the Andes", where the plane crashed on a glacier in the Andes. The used what was in the luggage to rescue themself. Were it locked away, things would have been tougher for them.

Figuring out how to handle low-probability situations is hard.

You make some good points, however I'm referring specifically to an evacuation situation on the ground due to fire, explosion, sinking or imminent destruction of the aircraft, where disembarking as soon as humanly possible is preferred.

Sure. I'm pointing out how enabling your scenario may have negative consequences for other scenarios, and the difficulty of determining if it's justifiable.

In certain other emergencies however, routine disembarkation is the preferred way to deboard the plane.

They should fail-safe to locked, to allow loading checked baggage from different customs areas into carry-on baggage compartments.

This does not seem practical.

1) Checked baggage in the baggage compartment is packed more efficiently than storing in the overhead compartment because the greater volume makes it easier to fill holes.

2) Larger planes save money by loading checked luggage into containers, and loading the entire container in one go.

3) Only small bags can be stored overhead, so this scheme requires different handling for small and large bags, which is more expensive.

4) Using carry-on baggage compartments means baggage handling staff must be in the passenger cabin to load and unload. They will likely block passengers and increase loading time, which costs money. If the baggage is loaded before passengers board, then the ground time and therefore operational costs increase because currently the baggage is loaded in parallel to passenger boarding.

5) It increases passenger dissatisfaction to have their carry-on luggage further away, which encourages people to switch to another carrier.

6) How much extra space do you think there is? I've been on many flights where people had to gate-check their luggage because the cabin ran out of space. Think of the cost if 20 bags had to be gate-checked into the baggage hold because 20 bags had been moved to the carry-on section. (And airlines don't know precisely how much carry-on baggage there will be, because people can buy things after check-in.)

I would like to see a simulation of this evacuation emergency with spirit airlines at miami.

Was the initial cause of the collision human error?

i was on r/singularity and people were saying that pilots should be replaced with AI, but what about if something goes wrong? wouldn't it be better to have a human takeover in emergency situations?

but i also wonder if automation would have prevented the initial collision.

The aviation industry doesn't usually reduce incidents down to a single proximate or ultimate cause like that, but instead notes every decision/event that contributed to the incident occurring. And then they usually spend time on how they can reduce the likelihood of such an event reoccurring at every single point in that chain. It appears that the coast guard plane lined up on the runway to prepare for takeoff instead of holding short of the runway as instructed and the JAL pilots did not see that their runway was not actually clear until it was too late to avoid a collision (if they saw the other plane at all).

From the JAL plane's perspective, automation is only as good as the sensors and logic which would be checking for if a runway is actually clear. Regardless of whether extant solutions are better than humans right now or will be better in the future, those solutions will still have a same failure mode as humans, which is suddenly realizing a runway that appeared to be clear actually isn't clear when it is too late to abort.

From the coast guard plane's perspective and from the controller perspective, automation and warnings might have been able to alert or prevent, however, automation can't just be thrown around as a solution without deep knowledge of the system and environment in which it will work. The main reason for this is ensuring that the transition between automated-control and human-control is clearly evident to the humans involved, that it occurs with enough time for the human to actually be able to avert a problem, and that the human is actually ready to take control. If the automated system silently disengages, a plane with permission to take off from a runway will instead just sit on the runway because the pilot assumes the automation will begin takeoff as expected, which brings us right back to a plane on the runway when it shouldn't be there and a landing plane not seeing it until it is too late. It is actually possible to land a plane purely with automation (military drones do it all the time), however that isn't done on commercial aircraft, because the constraints are so tight that if the automation were to fail for any reason there is a large chance the human pilot would be unable to prevent a crash even when perfectly monitoring the system (and perfect monitoring can't be assumed).

> The aviation industry doesn't usually reduce incidents down to a single proximate or ultimate cause like that

Correct. Folks here might be interested in the swiss cheese model: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_model

Of course it was because of a human error. A passenger plane landed on a runway that already had another plane on it. At least have a proper alerting system in place, we've had the tech for decades, you don't even need AI for any of it... but changes in commercial aviation unfortunately seem to be driven by accidents more than forethought.

I'm not sure what existing tech would have saved things? It seems the problem was the smaller plane was told to wait at a holding point and said ok but thought he could take off for some reason.

I don't want to sound crude but... really? How about a few sensors to check for aircraft presence on the runway and some way to feed that information to surrounding traffic? There's a million different ways this could be done, you just need a little bit of imagination.

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