Effect of passenger position on crash injury risk in aircraft (2015) [pdf]
tc.faa.gov
tc.faa.gov
The only emergency landing I’ve been in where the crew briefed us on position and checked us was hands on the back of the seat in front. Luckily it wasn’t a crash and the fire was quickly contained on the ground. Turned out the shoe removal was the most inconvenient but perhaps the most useful (evacuation slides worked, but then we were on hot tarmac without shoes).
What astonished me the most was how everybody went along and didn’t complain. This was almost 35 years ago —- I wonder if that would still be the case. These days I have seen pictures of people sliding down the evacuation slides with hand luggage!
It is true that there are many people who have a big and awkward hand luggage or who need a very long time to recover their luggage from overhead.
There are also many other people who are able to recover their hand luggage from the overhead in less than a second and in much less time than most other passengers are able to just stand up.
I do not see why such passengers should be penalized, even if they would certainly not slow down the evacuation. Losing the documents and data from the hand luggage may cause very serious problems that could need many months of work for solving and passing through many unpleasant experiences until then.
The only argument against this that is correct, is that like in every other domain people would self-assess their own abilities too optimistically, so even those who are slow would believe that they can retrieve their luggage fast enough to not hinder the evacuation, but then they would be proven wrong.
Perhaps the passengers should pass a test of hand luggage retrieval speed, before the flight, in order to be pre-approved for keeping their hand luggage in the case of an emergency landing :-)
This is they key. Not only overestimating their speed in taking down the luggage, but also other passengers overestimating how much time they have to safely get off the plane.
Take Spantax Flight 995, for example. Almost everyone survived the initial crash landing, but dozens died from smoke inhalation. Most of those who died were seated in the rear of the plane, where there was traffic in the aisles due to one or two people grabbing luggage from the overhead bins. There is an account from a survivor from the rear of the plane who only managed to escape because he climbed over the seats to get around the traffic. Most other passengers in the area were content to wait, not realizing how quickly the smoke would spread and turn lethal.
In addition whatever you're carrying could injure you during decent (especially at the end - FAA is OK with people breaking ankles) or worse piece the chute. The crew came by and took everybody's shoes and stowed them in the overheads before they checked our brace positions. They also moved me and two other guys in our 20s into the exit row and ejected the three people already there.
Our cabin could have been full of smoke, or worse (luckily, it was not at all like that) and so do you think they want to try to explain a decision tree to a bunch of panicked passengers?
Rather go through the months of work solving problem and having unpleasant experiences than be dead.
And you can be confident anyone holding me up in an emergency for mere documents and papers is going to experience immediate unpleasantness that they aren't going to solve.
It’s really unlikely YOUR luggage will impact YOur escape much at all, at worst you can abandon it at almost any point.
The consequence of injury will be for those around you, and possible delay for people behind you. But not really YOU.
For “important papers” I suspect there is some evaluation of how much they are willing to risk the lives of those other people at the back of the plane.
Rule should be if you bring your luggage you are handcuffed to the plane until the last person leaves. I think in older times you would have more severe consequences.
I am pretty sure that except for the people adjacent to the emergency exits, the others will have to wait their turn for a much longer time.
A backpack carried on the breast would not occupy space in which another human could have stayed.
For life or death situations, you need to have short clear rules that are easy to follow.
Remember, you will only actually lose your stuff if the plane is destroyed. If the plane is in the middle of being destroyed, just get out and be glad you are still alive!
Looking at this thread, we might need to put into regulation that taking baggage during an emergency evacuation is criminally negligent. (If someone behind you dies, negligent homicide.)
Everything else takes a back seat to those priorities.
An individual backpack might not displace an individual human but across ~300 passengers those 50 backpacks will displace people.
A passenger has practically zero information as to the seriousness of the crash. It could be a doozy. Or there could be a fuel leak waiting to ignite.
> backpack carried on the breast would not occupy space in which another human could have stayed
You're claiming given two lines of people, one wearing backpacks, the other not, that the latter cannot be compressed more than the former?
I agree that the retrieval of any bulky hand luggage should be forbidden.
You have way more time than you might expect after a plane crash. "Finally, [Captain] Sullenberger walked the cabin twice to confirm it was empty" [1]. If anybody had grabbed their hand luggage (especially from below their seat) they would've still had time to evacuate.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_Airways_Flight_1549#Ditchin...
When a Sukhoi Superjet 100 crash landed in Moscow, a fire broke out and fewer than half of the 78 occupants managed to escape the plane on time.
> Aeroflot claimed the evacuation took 55 seconds, though video evidence shows the slides still in use 70 seconds after their deployment. Passengers were seen carrying hand luggage out of the aircraft.
And you think that you're competent to determine whether there is sufficient time or not after the plane just crashed? If I were sitting in the row behind you, I'd much prefer you didn't.
Hell, even when there isn't plenty of time to kill grabbing your phone isn't going to kill anybody. [1]
You can phrase it as "important enough" all you want, but its really just why let an item to go waste unnecessarily.
Yeah, probably put your phone in your pocket if it's accessible. Keep your wallet in your pocket. If your wallet doesn't fit in your pocket, at least grab your id and payment cards, if they announce a rough landing while on approach and you have time to prepare a bit.
But if they had taken their backpack or suitcase, and had dropped it, they could have blocked other people; knocked other people out; broken someone's ankle making them harder to evacuate etc etc.
And this was a calm evacuation. Imagine a fire, low visibility due to the smoke, the sense of urgency, and you trip on some dimwit's suitcase, pushing the people in front of you down, some of them hitting heads, then panic sets in, the path towards that emergency exit is blocked, etc etc etc.
Leave your fucking luggage behind. If everything is fine, it will get to you afterwards. If the plane is on fire, you won't, but you'd also not kill people by not taking it.
You probably will lose grip on the backpack if you just carry it in your hands. And if you have straps behind your back, it's even worse because you can get tangled and delay others' evacuation.
Boarding.
It’s a shit show of people doing annoying stuff with their bags.
The idea that you could have some who can take their bags and some who can’t and that this would be acceptable to everyone is just not going to work. Combine this with the fact that a crisis alters people’s abilities. Some may be injured, some may be shocked. Then some poor crew member has to police the bs behaviour that would result.
I’ve been through training of smoke in aircraft, and it’s total chaos without adding things to trip over.
Airplanes contain a myriad of toxic-when-burned compounds, and death from smoke inhalation within the sealed tube of a fuselage is a matter of seconds.
And if it doesn’t look like a life-or-death situation, then you can come back later to retrieve the luggage. There is absolutely no reason to carry it during an emergency, period.
Famous last words. /s
Telemetry does not slow down the program. It is only one network access.
And so on, and so forth.
oh boy, that's one more thing that (1) passengers will irrationally fear about and spread hearsay about "safest" seats on a plane and (2) airlines will try to charge a premium for those safest seats :)
A truly hilarious and surprisingly educational listen, recommended to anyone who likes flying and Pythonesq humour. Stunningly quotable as well.
I caution that there are a couple of questionable and dated jokes made, but for early 1980's it's surprisingly PC.
Unfortunately, the psyche of the average passenger can't handle riding backwards. I've never understood it. Remove visual stimuli and it's impossible to tell the difference. Maybe we just need to close the window shades on takeoff and landing?
Ditto amusement park rides that move backwards (eg The Mummy). This includes when there is no visual indicator (in the dark)
(The trainsets reverse directions without being turned around themselves. Those using locomotives rather than electric traction operate in "pusher" mode for half their trips. There's an operator cab in the end car for such trips.)
Not really applicable to an aircraft hurtling along at 300m/s
Fair point that the military can choose its subjects, or compel them.
It sounds really interesting, but without multiple tries I’m not sure how much weight I can put on this.
So in a case of accident it can be jettisoned from the main fuselage, and it would land with a parachute without anyone getting injured.
Current airplane seats are set up too closely to fit my femurs. There's simply not enough space for me to put my head down, independently of where my arms go ;(
The fact that any brace position won't help in a head on collision and the foolish inference that it is therefore at best pointless and at worst some kind of ghoulish conspiracy (to maintain dental records, to ensure quick deaths yada yada) is a real bugbear of mine. Same goes for the criticism of "hide under a table during a nuclear attack". With any catastrophe, there are unavoidable deaths from the initial impact and loads of avoidable deaths and injuries from falling debris, glass shards, smoke inhalation etc. These measures are about the latter.
> A fourth-grade teacher in Chelyabinsk, Yulia Karbysheva, was hailed as a hero after saving 44 children from imploding window glass cuts. Despite not knowing the origin of the intense flash of light, Karbysheva thought it prudent to take precautionary measures by ordering her students to stay away from the room's windows and to perform a duck and cover maneuver and then to leave the building. Karbysheva, who remained standing, was seriously lacerated when the blast arrived and window glass severed a tendon in one of her arms and left thigh; none of her students, whom she ordered to hide under their desks, suffered cuts. The teacher was taken to a hospital which received 112 people that day. The majority of the patients were suffering from cuts.
If you aren't immediately killed by a fireball, or roasted by radiated heat, and are outside the "everything gets blown down" radius, it seems the major immediate danger is extreme winds from the blast. (Though radiated heat is also a line of sight effect)
So it absolutely makes sense that you'd want to be in a position that prevents all kinds of glass and debris impact, let alone getting thrown yourself.
My mental model is "instant tornado" and since I'm in the north, we all have basements to run to.
EDIT: typo
This is also why climbers use "dynamic" (elastic) ropes (when climbing, not necessarily for rappelling). Even a very short fall on a static line could be fatal.
1. There hasn't been a crash involving a commercial flight with few survivors in living memory. Either you get something like MH370 where everyone perishes or you get Asiana in SF which had three fatalities.
2. Absolutely baloney about the belt, the worst you can get is a bruise.
And you can get a hell of a lot more than a bruise from a seatbelt due to the magnitude of the forces involved in a plane crash, especially one that [allegedly] killed almost everyone else. Seat belt syndrome is a well-known thing.
The GP's story may or may not be true but your points for it being "extremely unlikely" don't hold water at all.
"In the event of an accident, one action that an occupant can take to contribute to their survival is to assume an appropriate “brace-for-impact” position. This is an action in which a person pre-positions their body against whatever they are most likely to be thrown against, significantly reducing injuries sustained. Occupants in the US Airways flight 1549 sustained shoulder injuries that they attributed to the brace position; therefore, the NTSB recommended that the position be re-evaluated. The Federal Aviation Administration investigated this by conducting a series of 17 sled impact tests, 15 with two rows of transport category forward facing passenger seats and two with a bulkhead configured to represent the types of seats currently in use. Head, neck, upper and lower leg injury risks were evaluated using an advanced test dummy and injury criteria from current FAA regulations, Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards, European auto safety regulations, and applicable research findings. The current brace position, head against the seat back with hands on top of the seat back, was only successful in reducing head injury risk for locked-out seat backs. However, for full break-over and energy absorbing seat backs, this position increased the severity of the head impact. There was, however, no evidence that the anthropomorphic test device interaction with any of the seatback types resulted in hyper- extension of the shoulder joint. Significant lower leg injury potential was not observed in this study, and therefore adopting lower leg injury criteria at this time does not appear to be a benefit. Even in the worst case test condition, the femur axial compressive force was below the regulatory limit, indicating that the femur compression criteria currently cited in FAA regulations is not likely to be exceeded in passenger seat dynamic qualification tests. To reduce detrimental interaction between the occupant’s arms and the seatback, the current position was modified by placing the hands down by the lower legs instead of on the seat back. This alternate position was successful in significantly reducing head and neck injury risk for all of the seat back types evaluated. This research has led to the determination that as seat technology has evolved, the most effective brace position has as well, and the current positions recommended in AC 121- 24B may need some adjustment to provide an equivalent level of safety for all passenger seat back types"