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leetrout

Clear view from the plane waiting to take off

https://www.reddit.com/r/CatastrophicFailure/comments/1isabt...

Which also brings into mind cockpit distractions but its amazing they caught this on video.

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From the same thread, an AMA by a passenger:

https://old.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/1is5unz/i_was_on_the_f...

Just to emphasize how insanely lucky they were:

> From inside we didn't see any of the fire, thank goodness! We were all upside down to start with, but many of us were able to release themselves pretty quickly. After that the "upright" of us helped the upside-down until we were all righted and ready to evacuate. We were able to quickly get out the one emergency exit that was safe, the other one poured jet fuel in when they opened it.

> the other one poured jet fuel in when they opened it

welp guess i'm never flying again

[flagged]

Wait until you hear how many car crashes there are per moth and how many fatal hiking accidents. You'll never travel again! That is, until you learn how many people pass away in their own home.

Wait until you hear how many people pass away as a result of eating cheeseburgers! Only somewhat kidding here.

The number of people that die from heart disease and stroke and diabetes is far far greater than plane crashes or car crashes.

Metabolic syndrome is a large constellation of diseases and scientists have discovered that many of them are largely preventable through diet and lifestyle choices!

Cars also contribute to the deaths from heart disease, stroke, and diabetes due to encouraging a sedentary lifestyle and making our locales less walkable... They also have a lot of externalities in the form of tire dust, noise pollution, and other effects.

Per mine and per hour flying is still much safer than driving

Overall yes, but they do present non trivial medical risks for some people.

Similarly, the risks for specific drivers in specific vehicles making specific trips isn’t the same as the risks for the average driver making an arbitrary trip.

Retention of agency carries a benefit you’re not calculating

You don't have agency over other drivers on the road and they might cause an accident without any fault of yours. That issue is (almost) entirely avoided by planes.

Though relatively rare, there’s a surprisingly long list of aircraft collisions.

Just a few weeks ago an American Airlines regional jet went down near Washington, D.C.'s after hitting a helicopter.

I never thought of that!

But importantly, I have the ability to see and react and avoid the collision. On the plane, I have the ability to eat lunch. Surely this could be considered a difference in agency.

I can't argue that you have more agency in a personal vehicle. Agency and safety are not directly correlated, though: in fact, I'd argue that for transportation, they're often inversely related.

I trust the competency of a professional pilot over my driving capabilities, even though the most serious incident I've ever had in 25 years of driving is a parking ticket.

Add in all of the _other_ drivers on the road (compared to professional pilots in controlled spaces), and it's not even close.

Oh god, there are mines?!

I think he meant per Mike

Why does it matter how many people are named Michael?

Anyone know the math on how many crashes it would take until this would equalize?

To have an equivalent fatality rate per passenger-mile, you'd need about 7,500 commercial aviation fatalities in the US per year (two and a half 9/11s, ~60 fully loaded 737s).

Per hour would be lower of course, maybe 1/10th as many just judging by "cruise speed." I couldn't find good hour-wise data.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_U...

I don't find per mile all that useful when comparing modes of transportation for safety, because for some modes of transportation the risk of a trip doesn't really depend much on the distance.

To give an extreme example, imagine someone starts passenger service from Earth to some planet in the Andromeda galaxy. Each flight carries 100 people. Once the warp field is stabilized the rest of the trip is 100% safe. However when the warp field is turned on their is a 99% chance that it will collapse rather than stabilize, which will destroy the ship and kill everyone aboard.

These Andromeda flights are 5 orders of magnitude safer than commercial air travel when measures by passenger fatalities per mile.

My brother in law, aviation firefighter, said after a crash you have 15s to egress, that's it. There's not a lot of air in the metal tube you're trapped in, it'll fill with smoke and everyone will be disoriented. It's also a long way to the exits, and the average person in the exit row probably will be in shock and likely not operate the exit door immediately.

Absolutely incredible the fireball was put out in the flip, these people are so lucky.

Presumably it helped that they crashed into a thick pile of snow in freezing conditions - I imagine that would slow the spread of the fire.

But still, that’s astonishing footage in the Reddit post linked above. Incredible that no one died.

Also the wing broke off early so the plane continued away from the initial fireball.

And the fuel spilled both away from the fuselage and onto snow, which both kept the main focus of the fire away from people and limited development of the fireball as well.

Kerosene (Jet-A) is relatively nonvolatile and tends to burn most violently when dispersed in air. It's not quite as heavy as diesel fuel, in which you can extinguish a lit match, but conditions in this incident probably limited flame development considerably.

All that snow is going to do next to a jet fuel fire is create a lot of steam.

The crash kicked up a lot of snow into the air, making me wonder if that helped suppress the fireball, as it seemed to die down very quickly. On thing leading to me think this might have happened is video from the recent firefighting in California, where the spray from the firefighting aircraft seemed to snuff out the flames as soon as it descended into them, before it reached the ground.

...and absorbing lots of heat as it evaporates.

There's a reason water is used for firefighting.

A fire can be extinguished with diesel (jet fuel is pretty much just cleaner diesel / kerosene) in cold conditions, I know because I’ve done it.

It takes a fair amount of heat / pressure to ignite jet fuel, easier if it’s vaporised.

Why were you trying to extinguish a fire using diesel?

I would guess they were not trying to extinguish a fire with diesel and accidentally learned you could.

Indeed. It was about 0 degree Celsius, camping and we were trying to get a bit of a fire going for heat. I won't do that with petrol as I value my eyebrows, ended up having to thin the diesel a bit with petrol as we discovered splashing diesel on a small flame on damp wood doesn't help at all.

The standard time for evacuating an aircraft that has to be demonstrated for certification purposes is 90 seconds with only half of the exits usable. It generally helps that the fire is (at least initially) outside the cabin most of the time. But yes, I wouldn't bet on conditions in the plane staying survivable for 90 seconds in all cases.

yikes.

Sounds like plenty of time for me to get my bag, pull out my phone, and start texting

You'll never have a better chance to go viral!

I say this half-jokingly:

If you're going to rip a wing off do it as early in the crash as possible so momentum will carry you past the fuel/fireball.

If fire develops when you've almost or completely stopped you are now involved in the fire and the fatality rate goes up dramatically.

That was a navy landing. Looks like the landing gear buckled. Also doesn’t look like there was much flaring prior to touchdown.

Or flaps, as is noted in other discussions.

Why doesn't every airport have a bunch of automated cameras around every landing/takeoff strip?

This seems like a really good question. if not for some random dude they wouldn't have any footage of this crash.

There are a plethora of security cameras covering the takeoff area to monitor for obstacles and unauthorized personnel as well as plenty of cameras covering security fences that likely have partial coverage of the interior area... lastly, there are multiple things recording everything the plane does including in the air traffic controller tower and the plane's black box.

Whether the folks controlling these recordings would publicly release them is debatable (especially as it may be seen as being in bad taste due to the trauma these folks experienced and especially especially if anyone had died or ends up dying from injuries sustained).

I would assume they do, but it's not exactly in their interest to release footage of catastrophes for public consumption.

I think they do, there was a bunch of footage of the AA collision it just took a little while for it to surface online. People publishing to social media is faster than an investigation

Holy shit, that was just pure luck that no one end up dead. Based on the video, the plane glide-flipped just enough to slide/roll itself out of the major fire. Things could be a whole lot worse if it played out just slightly differently.

I was thinking this, and also if the airframe had warped enough to prevent the doors opening (maybe this is impossible?).

I'm hoping that's a design consideration!

Boeing solved it by leaving the bolts out of the doors.

why engineer things complicated when simple will suffice ~ boeing

Stop, drop, and roll.

In this case more like drop, roll and stop.

Nice video!

No flare, hard landing, landing-gear collapse. Ouch.

The landing gear didn't collapse, the wings ripped off from landing too hard.

Only one wing separated

Either way, it's a write-off and it's not the landing gear's fault.

Does this pilot record lots of landings? Is this standard procedure?

It’s not a procedure but not against the rules assuming his parking brake was on. It would be similar to you taking notes in a personal notebook that you keep as a development journal.

I wonder why were they filming? Was there an early warning? Was it a sketchy landing in any case?

I mean aircraft are fascinating and people film them all the time but wouldn’t expect a pilot sitting in another one to casually film landings.

Maybe just an extremely lucky catch.

Probably just because pilots generally think planes are cool, especially when landing, and there's not much else to do while waiting in line but film them.

...after they've completed all their checklists and are ready for takeoff, of course.

In Toronto that day, there was a lot of waiting on the tarmac

As a former aviator, the joke in the business is that a career in aviation is largely stupefying boredom interrupted by moments of sheer terror.

Also perfectly descriptive of being an anesthesiologist. We had a resident who, at the end of most OR days, even during his third (final) year of residency, would come into the ready room and remark, "Something really amazing happened today...."

The fact that this was still the case for him after anesthetizing thousands of patients was troubling to us attendings.

I diagnosed my first pseudocholinesterase deficiency as a CA-1 (for non-doctors: second-year resident, patient was still paralyzed after a long case from a drug that usually lasts ~5 minutes, had to send him to ICU on ventilator until it finally broke down from all the other enzymes in the body). Had to be an attending for ~10 years before I got a malignant hyperthermia case. Do not want to repeat either of those.

No. Surprises. Ever. Unless it's ROSC (return of spontaneous circulation, aka we succeeded) in a code.

That's interesting. I never encountered either a pseudocholinesterase deficiency or MH during my 38 years of residency/attending/private practice.

However — in my first year of residency, during my rotation at the VA, while performing my first brachial plexus block, I unknowingly injected lidocaine into the axillary artery: as the patient began seizing, the attending calmly said "Joe, take out the needle, I'm going to give him some diazepam." Worked!

Never had another intravascular injection (that became symptomatic) doing a regional block.

One of my attendings during residency was Kenyan. In the bush, pediatric anesthesia was lido until they seized. At that point, you knew they could not feel anything.

This is insanely wonderful and amazing!!!!

As he put it, “cardiac-wise, they were very stable - no arrhythmias.”

Yeah, this guy probably has a library of landing videos.

I think most pilots could take one look at that approach and see they were coming in too fast. As many have said, that looked more like a carrier landing than an airstrip approach.

Flight radar shows a normalized approach where speed and altitude conform to that standard. I wonder if late wind shear was the issue.

1100 feet/minute descent rate?

Extremely lucky, probably not. More in the sense "under different circumstances, this would have gone into the folder Uninteresting Landings, never to be viewed again." Ubiquitous smartphones mean petabytes upon petabytes of boring photos and videos - the "unusual" part is just in the event itself.

And now we are going to require body cams in everything and AI will sort it out for us

Because of the tricky conditions and great view. Presumably they were waiting for that arrival and it’s not every day you get that view of crosswind landings into such a snowy airport.

Lots of pilots know each other and will sometimes film each other's landings just for fun. The original idea was probably along the lines of "Bill's coming in and I have a good angle on it, let's take a video and send it to him." Landing is the hardest part of piloting an airplane and many pilots take pride in their ability to land smoothly.

Slight tangent, if you are on an airplane that lands smoothly despite bad weather and crosswinds, compliment the pilot as you leave the plane. I once offered a "That was a damned impressive landing in this wind" on my way off an airplane and the pilot simply beamed with pride.

I saw the footage, and wondered if perhaps he knew he had a buddy filming him, and there was a “watch this” going on, decided to flare as late as possible, and he just flared… well, stick up after you hit the deck like a sack of potatoes doesn’t do much for you.

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