What happens to bodies when an airplane crashes. Russian scientist told what a person feels during a plane crash

(Collected from various websites)

Alexander Andryukhin

If what happens in the cockpit during a crash can be judged from the records of the flight recorders, then there are no "black boxes" in the cabin. Izvestia tracked down several people who survived plane crashes or got into serious flight accidents ...

The story of Larisa Savitskaya is listed in the Guinness Book of Records. In 1981, at an altitude of 5220 meters, the An-24 aircraft in which she was flying collided with a military bomber. 37 people died in that crash. Only Larisa managed to survive.

I was then 20 years old, - says Larisa Savitskaya. - Volodya, my husband, and I flew from Komsomolsk-on-Amur to Blagoveshchensk. returned from honeymoon trip. First we sat in the front seats. But ahead I did not like it, and we moved to the middle. I fell asleep immediately after takeoff. And woke up from the roar and screams. His face was cold. Then I was told that our plane had its wings cut off and the roof blown off. But I don't remember the sky above my head. I remember it was foggy, like in a bathhouse. I looked at Volodya. He didn't move. Blood splattered across his face. I knew right away that he was dead. And prepared to die too. Then the plane broke up, and I lost consciousness. When she came to herself, she was surprised that she was still alive. I felt like I was lying on something hard. It turned out to be in the aisle between the chairs. And near the whistling abyss. There were no thoughts in my head. Fear too. In the state I was in - between sleep and reality - there is no fear. The only thing that came to my mind was an episode from an Italian film where a girl, after a plane crash, soared in the sky among the clouds, and then, having fallen into the jungle, remained alive. I didn't expect to survive. I just wanted to die without pain. I noticed the crossbars of the metal floor. And I thought: if I fall sideways, it will be very painful. I decided to change position and regroup. Then she crawled to the next row of chairs (our row stood near the break), sat down in a chair, clutched the armrests and rested her feet on the floor. All this was done automatically. Then I look - the earth. Very close. She grabbed the armrests with all her might and pushed herself away from the chair. Then - like a green explosion from larch branches. And again a memory failure. When I woke up, I saw my husband again. Volodya sat with his hands on his knees and looked at me with a fixed gaze. It was raining, which washed the blood from his face, and I saw a huge wound on his forehead. Under the armchairs lay a dead man and woman...
Later it was established that a piece of the plane - four meters long and three wide, on which Savitskaya fell, planned like an autumn leaf. He fell into a soft marshy clearing. Larisa lay unconscious for seven hours. Then for two more days I sat in a chair in the rain and waited for death to come. On the third day I got up, started looking for people and came across a search party. Larisa received several injuries, a concussion, a broken arm and five cracks in her spine. You can't go with these injuries. But Larisa refused the stretcher and reached the helicopter herself.
The plane crash and the death of her husband remained with her forever. According to her, her feelings of pain and fear are dulled. She is not afraid of death and still quietly flies on airplanes. But her son, who was born four years after the disaster, is terrified of flying.

Arina Vinogradova is one of the two surviving stewardesses of the Il-86 aircraft, which in 2002, having barely taken off, fell into Sheremetyevo. There were 16 people on board: four pilots, ten flight attendants and two engineers. Only two flight attendants survived: Arina and her friend Tanya Moiseeva.

They say that in the last seconds, your whole life scrolls before your eyes. This didn’t happen to me, ”Arina tells Izvestia. - Tanya and I were sitting in the first row of the third cabin, at the emergency exit, but not in service chairs, but in passenger ones. Tanya is in front of me. The flight was technical - we just had to return to Pulkovo. At some point, the plane shook. This happens with the "IL-86". But for some reason I realized that we were falling. Although nothing seemed to happen, there was no siren or roll. I didn't get scared. Consciousness instantly swam somewhere, and I fell into a black void. I woke up with a sharp shock. At first I didn't understand anything. Then it slowly unraveled. It turned out that I was lying on a warm engine, littered with chairs. She couldn't pull herself away. She began to scream, pound on the metal and shake Tanya, who either raised her head or lost consciousness again. We were pulled out by firefighters and taken to different hospitals.
Arina still works as a flight attendant. The plane crash, she said, left no trauma in her soul. However, the incident affected Tatyana Moiseeva very strongly. Since then, she no longer flies, although she has not left aviation. He still works in the squad of flight attendants, but already as a dispatcher. She does not even tell close friends about what she experienced.

The group "Lyceum" is known throughout the country. But few people know that two singers from this group - Anna Pletneva and Anastasia Makarevich - also survived a fall on an airplane.

This happened five years ago, - Anna Pletneva tells Izvestia. - I was always terrified of flying by plane, but then I got braver. She flew with Nastya Makarevich to Spain. We had a great rest. In a cheerful mood, they returned to Moscow on a Boeing-767. Neighbors were with a child. The minute we started to descend and the flight attendants told us to fasten our seat belts, I had the baby in my arms. And then the plane went downhill. Things fell on his head, the flight attendants shouted: "Hold the children! Get down!" I realized that we were falling, and pressed the baby to me. In my head flashed: "Is this all?" I used to think that when it was so scary, my heart should be beating wildly. But you don't really feel the heart. You don’t feel yourself, but you look at everything as if from the outside. The worst thing is hopelessness. You can't influence anything. But there was no panic - the one that is shown in the movies. Grave silence. Everyone, as if in a dream, buckled up and froze. Someone prayed, someone said goodbye to relatives.
Anna does not remember how much time has passed. Maybe seconds... Or minutes.
“Suddenly, the plane gradually began to level off,” she recalls, “I looked around: did it really only seem to me? But no, others also started up ... Even when we stopped on the runway, we could not believe that everything ended well. The commander announced: "Congratulations to everyone! We were born in a shirt. Now everything will be fine in your life."
- What is surprising, I have ceased to be afraid to fly on airplanes, - she says. - And on charter flights pilots often let us into the cockpit and let us steer. I like it so much that I want to buy my own small plane soon. We will fly it on tour.

The Izvestia journalist Georgy Stepanov also survived the fall.

It happened in the summer of 1984,” he recalls. - I flew on a Yak-40 plane from Batumi to Tbilisi. When I got on the plane, there was a feeling that I was in a gypsy camp - there were so many things there. They were clogged with all the compartments from above, as well as the passage of the cabin. Don't push through. Passengers, of course, were also more than expected. We took off and gained altitude. Below the sea. Pulled into slumber. But then the fuselage seemed to have been hit with a sledgehammer, the rumble of the turbine became different, and the plane abruptly, almost vertically, went down. Everyone who was not fastened flew off their seats and rolled around the cabin interspersed with things. Screams, screams. A terrible panic began. I was strapped in. I still remember my state of horror. Everything in me broke off, my body seemed to be stiff. The feeling was that everything was not happening to me, but I was somewhere on the side. The only thing I thought: poor parents, what will happen to them? I couldn't scream or move. Nearby everyone was completely white with fear. Their dead, motionless eyes were striking, as if they were already in another world.
We actually fell for no more than a minute. The plane leveled off: passengers began to come to their senses, pick up things. Then, when we were already flying up to Tbilisi, the pilot got out of the cockpit. He was like a zombie. We began to ask: what happened? In response, he wanted to laugh it off, but somehow it was a pity he did it, it became embarrassing for him.
This fall still haunts me. When I get on a plane, I feel like a completely helpless creature in an unreliable shell.

The world knows more than a dozen cases of happy salvation

No matter how many specialists, referring to statistics, assure us that air transport is the safest, many are afraid to fly. The earth leaves hope, the height does not. How did those who did not survive the plane crash feel? We will never know this. According to research by the Interstate Aviation Committee, the consciousness of a person in a falling plane is turned off. In most cases - in the first seconds of the fall. At the moment of impact with the ground in the cabin there is not a single person who would be conscious. As they say, a protective reaction of the body is triggered.

The ancient Greek poet Theognid wrote: "What is not destined by fate will not happen, but what is destined - I am not afraid of that." There are also cases of miraculous salvation. Larisa Savitskaya is not the only one who survived the plane crash. In 1944, the English pilot Stephen, shot down by the Germans, fell from a height of 5500 meters and survived. In 2003, a Boeing 737 crashed in Sudan. A two-year-old child survived, although the plane was almost completely burned down. The world knows more than a dozen such cases.

From the material of "Komsomolskaya Pravda", published after the crash of the AN-24 at Varandey airport:

24 people survived the crash, 28 more died.
Many of those rescued are still in shock and refuse to speak. But according to three survivors - Sergei Trefilov, Dmitry Dorokhov and Alexei Abramov - KP correspondents restored what happened in the cabin of the falling plane.

According to official reports, An-24, tail number 46489, disappeared from the radar screens at 13.43 when landing.

13.43
Sergey:
- Commander Viktor Popov said over the speakerphone: “Our plane has begun to descend. In a few minutes we will land at the airport in the village of Varandey.” The voice was completely calm. He announced the landing in Usinsk in the same way. Immediately the stewardess walked through the cabin and sat on a folding chair in the tail. Everything was as usual - this is the 10th time I fly on this watch.

Dmitry:
- The plane began to shake violently. But there was no panic. Around me, people were talking in undertones. We talked about football, about the watch. The neighbor said that he felt sick when landing. But there were no words about the fact that the plane was falling.

13.44 - 13.55
Sergey:
We were flying low. Highly. We saw that under the wing there is no runway - only snow. A man behind me asked: “Where are we sitting down? In field?"

13.56
Sergey:
- The plane fell on its left side somehow too much. And then there was such a sound outside the window - iron, as if something was coming off. People started to look at each other.

Dmitry Dorokhov escaped with a slight fright: “The leg will heal! The main thing is that he is alive.

Dmitry:
- We were waiting for the pilots to announce now: they say, everything is fine. But the cockpit was silent. And then the plane went down steeply. Someone shouted: “Everything, b ...! We're falling!

Alexei:
- I was shocked that only one screamed in the cabin. The rest silently pressed themselves into chairs or began to hide their heads between their knees.

Sergey:
“They didn’t say anything over the loudspeaker. Only some strange sound, as if the pilots turned on the microphone, but immediately turned it off. The stewardess was also silent - she did not try to calm the people.

13.57
Sergey:
- I saw in the window how the plane touched the ground with its wing. He couldn't close his eyes, he stared and that was it. After that, the pilots obviously tried to level the plane, we jumped up a little. And crashed into the snow!

Alexei:
- Fell silently. Very fast. Everyone sat in a daze. Now many newspapers say that the pilots were blinded by a flash of sunlight reflected from the icy strip. That's bullshit! There were no outbreaks. Only a blow.
I didn't lose consciousness. Only two seconds in the eyes was dark. You know, like after being punched in the jaw. For about five seconds there was complete silence in the cabin. And then all at once stirred, groaned.

13.58 - 14.00
Alexei Abramov rescued four from a burning plane. His godmother says, "He's a real hero!"

Sergey:
- The plane lay on its side, and there was a hole in the wall. In the salon, someone was constantly wailing: “It hurts! Hurt!" I climbed out and crawled down the aisle.

Dmitry:
- The worst thing is that all the people were plagued - they could not come to their senses. They just didn't understand what happened. I shake my neighbor: “Alive?” And he hums. And then the gas tank caught fire. There was no explosion. The flames crawled through the cabin gradually.

Sergey:
- People sitting closer to the bow began to light up and scream. The clothes flashed in an instant. And these "living torches" jumped up and ran to the tail. On us.
Someone shouted: "Take things, put them out!" We started grabbing sheepskin coats and jackets from luggage racks and throwing them at people. Three minutes fussed - extinguished. But I was shocked: even when people were on fire, they did not panic. They screamed in pain, not fear.

14.01 - 14.08
Sergey:
- Then someone commanded: “We climb outside! Now everything is going to explode here…” Me and someone else got out through a hole in the fuselage.

Dmitry:
- The stewardess saved us all. She kicked out the emergency hatch and led people through it.

Alexei:
- I was one of the first near the hatch. He helped four people get out, it was clear that they themselves could not - their arms and legs were broken. I shout at them: "Crawl!" - and pull. Pulled out. Then he jumped out.

14.09
Sergey:
- There were some warehouses near the plane. And people from there immediately ran to the plane. And everyone who got out of the cabin, they dragged away. And shouted all the time: “Come on! Let's!"

Dmitry:
- Immediately drove the "Ural". Those who could not get up on their own were loaded and taken to the village. And we sat down on the snow and looked around like newborn babies.

Alexei:
- Nobody then remembered about things - jackets, bags, mobile phones. I did not even feel the cold, although I was in one sweater. And only in the hospital, when the first shock had passed, did I see that many had tears rolling down their faces...

And here is how it happens on earth (from reports on the crash of TU-154 Anapa - St. Petersburg):

eyewitness testimony

Residents of the Donetsk region who saw how the Tu-154 fell
The Pulkovo Airlines plane took off from Anapa yesterday afternoon.
Among the 160 passengers on board were almost fifty children, because Anapa is a popular children's resort.
Approximately at 15.30 Moscow time, the ship's commander transmitted an SOS signal to the ground. And literally two minutes after that, the plane disappeared from the radar.
We got through to the inhabitants of the village of Novgorodskoye, not far from the place where the plane crashed.
“He circled around the ground for a long time, and just before landing, he caught fire,” Galina STEPANOVA, a resident of the village of Novgorodskoye, Donetsk region, told us, near which this tragedy happened. - We have fields of the state farm "Stepnoy" outside the village. That's where the plane crashed. It rolled over several times in the air, stuck its nose into the ground and exploded. Our local residents, until the police arrived and cordoned off everything, went to look. They say everything is charred there. Well, wow, for a month and a half it was so hot, everyone was waiting for the rain. We waited. There was such a downpour, and a thunderstorm - it took your breath away. Most likely, because of the thunderstorm, the trouble happened.
“Before the catastrophe, a strong thunderstorm began,” says eyewitness Gennady KURSOV from the village of Stepnoe, near which the plane crashed. - The sky was covered with clouds. Suddenly there was the sound of a low-flying airliner. But until the last moment it was not visible! We and the inhabitants of other surrounding villages noticed it only when there were 150 meters left to the ground. I thought that it would fall right on us. It was spinning around its axis like a helicopter...

In the airoport

Information about Flight 612 disappeared from the scoreboard as soon as contact with the aircraft was lost.
The flight from Anapa was supposed to land at Pulkovo at 17.45. But at about 16.00, the line "Anapa - Petersburg" suddenly went out on the scoreboard. Few people paid attention to this - the meeting people had not yet arrived at the airport.
And this was the very moment when communication between the controllers and the crew was irretrievably lost ...
When it became clear that the plane had died, the calm voice of the announcer sounded at Pulkovo:
- Those meeting flight 612 from Anapa are invited to the cinema room ...
- Why cinema? - those who met were worried and, still not understanding anything, but already suspecting the worst, rushed there. And there are lists of passengers who have registered for this flight posted on the glass doors of the cinema hall. People stood in silence in front of these sheets for several minutes. They didn't believe.
And only when almost all the bars of the Pulkovo airport at once started working televisions with horrific news - the first heartbreaking cry was heard in the corridors of the airport.

From the words of a passenger flying on the same days:

we flew from Anapa on August 13th, I was there with my family ...
and before leaving, he wrote a will for an apartment ...
and on the car - so that it would be easier for my friends-loan guarantors to pay for me in case of something irreparable ...
how they laughed at me and as soon as they did not name my act
laughed - until yesterday, when dozens of families went to eternity
now almost everyone called back and my act no longer seems so "wild" to them
it hurts me to think about it
that these people also sat on the same benches in the reservoir of the Anapa port
sat and looked at the runway, planes, takeoffs and landings ...
and now they are gone, and the world lives on as before, but already without them...
how painful it is to realize that death does not change the world as a whole, but only breaks the fate of individual people.
I already wrote this somewhere here on the branches, but these thoughts do not go away, they go in circles all the time and do not give rest.
and the mother is crying for the 2nd day - she says that she has a feeling that WE "slipped through"
past death, although we are separated from the catastrophe by 9 days...
I will repeat again and again:
let the earth rest in peace to passengers
eternal clear sky to the crew
let the dead children become angels.

"The speed of the pulses is below the speed of the explosion"

In the area of ​​the village of Stepanovskoye, Ramensky district, Moscow region, search work continues at the crash site of the An-148 aircraft Saratov Airlines. locals, meanwhile, they organized a memorial here and lit 71 candles - by the number dead passengers and crew members. The answer to the question: "Why did the disaster happen?" after decoding the data from the flight recorders, experts will give. But after each such emergency, the relatives of the victims, and many other people who often board the aircraft not without fear, are also tormented by other questions: “What did the person feel at the time of the disaster? Was he in pain? Did he know he was dying? We asked Sergei Savelyev, Head of the Laboratory for the Development of the Human Nervous System at the Research Institute of Human Morphology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, to answer them.

salon AN-148.

- Sergey Vyacheslavovich, tell me, during an explosion, does the human brain manage to transmit pain sensations to the body?

Since all this happens very quickly, I can say that, most likely, the victim of a plane crash does not have time to feel pain. Everything is very simple. The speed of conducting impulses in our body along the nerves to the receptors is much lower than the speed of the explosion. It's just instant death.

- Does the brain have time to understand that death is about to come?

Again, it all depends on the situation. If you mean, again, an explosion, then of course not. And if we consider that a person flies in a plane that has lost control for several seconds, then here everything is already happening according to a different scenario. The fact is that we are programmed in such cases for a positive outcome. A person always hopes that he will get out and stay alive. It resists to the last, while the brain is alive. And he dies last. This is due to our blood supply system.

Sergey Vyacheslavovich, is it true that before a flight some people's intuition may tell them not to board an airliner that is about to crash?

There is no intuition in this regard. Well, imagine, you approach the plane and see that everything is in order with it. What will life experience tell you in this case? Nothing. And sometimes you approach the plane (I had such a case), and one of its engines smokes. Sat and flew. Everything went fine. Astral tails don't help here.

Is it possible to trick the brain during a flight if it is too scary? Let's say you close your eyes and imagine that you are on a train?

As a result of a plane crash, the body of the victim is often damaged by the following several factors simultaneously or in rapid succession, and the action of one factor often overlaps with another:
1) dynamic and shock overloads;
2) counter air flow;
3) explosive decompression;
4) atmospheric electricity;
5) thermal impact;
6) toxic products of combustion and pyrolysis;
7) blunt objects located inside the aircraft;
8) blast wave;
9) external parts of the aircraft;
10) running engines;
11) high-altitude decompression;
12) shaking, vibration.

When an aircraft collides with an obstacle, they can cause overloads that reach very large values ​​of the order of tens and even hundreds of g units. At the same time, the body is torn off the back of the chair and is held by seat belts. Depending on the magnitude of the overload, the consequences for the victims can be of a different nature - from functional disorders of breathing and blood circulation associated with the relative movement of the internal organs of the chest and abdomen, and loss of consciousness - to mechanical damage caused by seat belts in the form of abrasions, bruises, sometimes skin tears and soft tissues, injuries of the spine, and in the event of a collision of an aircraft at high speed with an obstacle or the ground - in the form of gross damage to all tissues at the level of seat belts up to the separation of the upper body. In the latter case, as a rule, subsequent significant destruction of the head and torso occurs as a result of the impact of these parts of the body on objects located in front.

Radial accelerations and the corresponding overloads occur when trying to get out of a dive in emergency situations. In these cases, there is a significant displacement of soft tissues, internal organs, and especially blood in large vessels, accompanied by a sharp violation of breathing, circulation, functions of the central nervous system, visual impairment, loss of consciousness, as well as traumatic injuries to tissues and vital organs.

When the overload is directed in the direction of the head-legs, a significant part of the circulating blood (up to 1/4 of the total mass) moves into the vessels of the abdominal cavity and extremities, as a result of which the work of the heart is disturbed, anemia of the brain develops with loss of consciousness. The outcome in such a situation will depend on the duration of the unconscious state and the flight altitude at which the loss of consciousness occurred. As a result of the displacement and deformation of the internal organs and tissues of the abdominal cavity and their sharp overflow with blood, multiple hemorrhages can be observed in the mesentery of the intestine, under the capsule and in the ligaments of the internal organs, loose fatty tissue.

Overloads directed from the legs to the head, a person endures much harder. Already at an acceleration of the order of 4-5 g, a strong rush of blood to the head occurs, accompanied by redness and swelling of the face, nosebleeds, multiple small hemorrhages in the skin of the face, conjunctiva of the eyes, membranes and substance of the brain. A sharp increase in intracranial pressure leads to rapid loss of consciousness and death. In this case, fractures of the upper and lower extremities, compression fractures of the spine, fractures of the base and calvarium of the skull, injuries of the soft extremities can be observed.

The oncoming air flow at high flight speeds (800-1000 km / h or more) has the properties of a solid body, since the pressure force of the air flow under these conditions exceeds the weight of a person by 50-70 times. The oncoming air flow can rip off household items and clothes. When the oxygen mask is torn off, a sharp deformation of the soft tissues of the face occurs with extensive hemorrhage and their detachment from the underlying bones, rupture of the corners of the mouth, and damage to the eyeballs. A jet of air that has penetrated under high pressure into the upper respiratory tract and esophagus can lead to barotrauma of the lungs and stomach; reflex violation of breathing and cessation of oxygen supply causes acute oxygen starvation. As a result of the breakdown of the arms from the armrests and the legs from the footrests,
scattering of limbs, accompanied by dislocations, sprains of articular ligaments, muscle tears, hemorrhages.

Explosive decompression is observed in flight at an altitude of over 8-9 thousand meters as a result of emergency depressurization of the cabin. As a result of a sharp pressure drop, a person may experience barotrauma of the lungs and hearing aid, as well as gas embolism. Barotrauma of the hearing aid is accompanied by a rupture of the tympanic membrane, damage to the auditory ossicles, hemorrhage in the tissues of the middle and inner ear and the tympanic cavity.

With barotrauma of the lungs, there is liquid blood in the airways, acute swelling of the lungs, multiple focal hemorrhages and ruptures of the lung tissue. Along with the macrofocal nature of changes in the lung tissue along the branching of the bronchi, small ruptures and hemorrhages are also observed.

Blunt objects located inside the aircraft are the main damaging factor in the fall and impact of the aircraft on the ground. In this case, deformation and destruction of its structure occurs, as well as the mutual displacement of the people in the aircraft and the objects surrounding them. The resulting shock overloads, depending on the speed and angle of incidence of the aircraft, can exceed hundreds and even thousands of times the impact forces on the victims observed in ground transport accidents.

The result of shock overloads of enormous force can be gross destruction of the body with separation of its individual parts (head, limbs, pelvic region) with extensive ruptures and crushing of the skin and soft tissues, crushing of bones, opening of body cavities and crushing, separation, displacement of internal organs or their ejection out.

The blast wave is the most powerful damaging factor that occurs as a result of an explosion of fuel in fuel tanks or a terrorist attack. Most often, the first explosion occurs at the moment the aircraft hits the ground, sometimes in the air after touching the ground. When a jet aircraft falls to the ground in a dive mode, followed by an explosion, the funnel can reach a depth of several meters. A powerful blast wave causes complete destruction of aircraft structures and bodies. At the same time, the remains are found both in the funnel itself and outside it, scattered over an area with a radius of up to 300-500 m. In the event of an explosion in the air after touching the ground, the remains of people who were on the plane are scattered at a distance of up to 3 km in the direction of flight and up to 1.5 km away from the explosion site.

With the complete destruction of the body as a result of an explosion, separate small flaps of skin are usually found without settling their edges, auricles with part of the temporal bone, pieces of internal organs, bone fragments with fragments of soft tissues, sometimes hands, feet or parts of them. In a terrorist attack, extensive injuries with separations of body parts, multiple penetrating and blind shrapnel wounds are received by persons located directly near the explosion site, the rest most often die as a result of mechanical damage during the subsequent fall of the aircraft and its impact on the ground.

As a result of the action of the flame, clothing can be ignited, body burns, as well as post-mortem burning of corpses, reaching extreme degrees with charring of soft tissues and bones up to their incineration. Sometimes a fire is preceded by an explosion, in these cases, the remains of corpses are already exposed to thermal effects.

I've always wondered what people experience in a falling plane. Summarizing the experience of eyewitnesses who survived plane crashes, one interesting conclusion can be drawn - the devil is not so terrible as he is painted ...

First, be more afraid when you drive to the airport. In 2014, over 33 million flights were made in the world, there were 21 air crashes (moreover, most of the trouble in the sky falls on cargo transportation), in which only 990 people died. Those. the probability of a plane crash is only 0.0001%. During the same year, in Russia alone, 26,963 people died in traffic accidents, and according to WHO, 1.2 million people die in road accidents and about 50 million are injured annually in the world.

Secondly, judging by the statistics, you are much more likely to die on an escalator in the subway or contract AIDS than die on an airplane. So the chance of dying in a plane crash is 1 in 11,000,000, while, for example, in a car accident - 1 in 5,000, so now it is much safer to fly than drive a car. Moreover, every year aviation technology becomes safer. By the way, Africa remains the most unfavorable continent in terms of flight safety: only 3% of all flights in the world are operated here, but 43% of air crashes have occurred!

Thirdly, with strong overloads, you will not remember anything According to research by the Interstate Aviation Committee, the consciousness of a person in a falling plane is turned off. In most cases - in the first seconds of the fall. At the moment of impact with the ground there is not a single person in the cabin who would be conscious. As they say, a protective reaction of the body is triggered. This thesis is confirmed by those who managed to survive in plane crashes. Silence also accompanies minor air incidents, a selection of videos

Fourth, the experience of surviving plane crashes. The story of Larisa Savitskaya is listed in the Guinness Book of Records. In 1981, at an altitude of 5220 meters, the An-24 aircraft in which she was flying collided with a military bomber. 37 people died in that crash. Only Larisa managed to survive.

I was then 20 years old, - says Larisa Savitskaya. - Volodya, my husband, and I flew from Komsomolsk-on-Amur to Blagoveshchensk. I fell asleep immediately after takeoff. And woke up from the roar and screams. His face was cold. Then I was told that our plane had its wings cut off and the roof blown off. But I don't remember the sky above my head. I remember it was foggy, like in a bathhouse. I looked at Volodya. He didn't move. Blood splattered across his face. I knew right away that he was dead. And prepared to die too. Then the plane broke up, and I lost consciousness. When she came to herself, she was surprised that she was still alive. I felt like I was lying on something hard. It turned out to be in the aisle between the chairs. And near the whistling abyss. There were no thoughts in my head. Fear too. In the state I was in - between sleep and reality - there is no fear. The only thing that came to my mind was an episode from an Italian film where a girl, after a plane crash, soared in the sky among the clouds, and then, having fallen into the jungle, remained alive. I didn't expect to survive. I just wanted to die without pain. I noticed the crossbars of the metal floor. And I thought: if I fall sideways, it will be very painful. I decided to change position and regroup. Then she crawled to the next row of chairs (our row stood near the break), sat down in a chair, clutched the armrests and rested her feet on the floor. All this was done automatically. Then I look - the earth. Very close. She grabbed the armrests with all her might and pushed herself away from the chair. Then - like a green explosion from larch branches. And again a memory failure. When I woke up, I saw my husband again. Volodya sat with his hands on his knees and looked at me with a fixed gaze. It was raining, which washed the blood from his face, and I saw a huge wound on his forehead. Under the armchairs lay a dead man and woman...

Later it was established that a piece of the plane - four meters long and three wide, on which Savitskaya fell, planned like an autumn leaf. He fell into a soft marshy clearing. Larisa lay unconscious for seven hours. Then for two more days I sat in a chair in the rain and waited for death to come. On the third day I got up, started looking for people and came across a search party. Larisa received several injuries, a concussion, a broken arm and five cracks in her spine. You can't go with these injuries. But Larisa refused the stretcher and reached the helicopter herself.

The plane crash and the death of her husband remained with her forever. According to her, her feelings of pain and fear are dulled. She is not afraid of death and still quietly flies on airplanes.

Another case confirms the disconnection of consciousness. Arina Vinogradova is one of the two surviving stewardesses of the Il-86 aircraft, which in 2002, having barely taken off, fell into Sheremetyevo. There were 16 people on board: four pilots, ten flight attendants and two engineers. Only two flight attendants survived: Arina and her friend Tanya Moiseeva. They say that in the last seconds, your whole life scrolls before your eyes. This didn’t happen to me, ”Arina tells Izvestia. - Tanya and I were sitting in the first row of the third cabin, at the emergency exit, but not in service chairs, but in passenger ones. Tanya is in front of me. The flight was technical - we just had to return to Pulkovo. At some point, the plane shook. This happens with the "IL-86". But for some reason I realized that we were falling. Although nothing seemed to happen, there was no siren or roll. I didn't get scared. Consciousness instantly swam somewhere, and I fell into a black void. I woke up with a sharp shock. At first I didn't understand anything. Then it slowly unraveled. It turned out that I was lying on a warm engine, littered with chairs. She couldn't pull herself away. She began to scream, pound on the metal and shake Tanya, who either raised her head or lost consciousness again. We were pulled out by firefighters and taken to different hospitals.

Arina still works as a flight attendant. The plane crash, she said, left no trauma in her soul. However, the incident affected Tatyana Moiseeva very strongly. Since then, she no longer flies, although she has not left aviation.

Fifth, a plane crash is a positive experience for survivors! Scientists came to unique conclusions: people who survived plane crashes later turned out to be healthier from a psychological point of view. They showed less anxiety, anxiety, did not fall into depression and did not experience post-traumatic stress, in contrast to the subjects from the control group, who had never had such an experience.

In conclusion, I bring to your attention the speech of Rick Elias, who was sitting on the front row of the plane that committed emergency landing into the Hudson River in New York in January 2009. You will find out what thoughts came to his mind as the doomed plane fell down ...

Still afraid to fly?-)

Original taken from valkiriarf What Passenger Bodies Can Tell About a Plane Crash

Beyond the black box

Dennis Shanagan works from a spacious second-floor office in the house he shares with his wife, Maureen, a ten-minute drive from downtown Carlsbad, California. He has a quiet, sunny office that doesn't look like it's supposed to be a terrible job. Shanagan is an expert on bodily harm. He devotes a significant part of his time to the study of wounds and fractures in living people. He is consulted by car manufacturers whose customers are suing on dubious grounds (seat belt torn, I wasn't driving, etc.), which can be verified by the nature of their damage. But at the same time he deals with dead bodies. In particular, he took part in the investigation into the crash of Trans World Airlines Flight 800.

Airplane taking off from international airport named after John F. Kennedy on July 17, 1996 in Paris, exploded in the air over Atlantic Ocean near East Moritch, New York. Eyewitness accounts were conflicting. Some claimed to have seen the plane hit by a rocket. Traces of explosives were found in the wreckage, but no traces of a projectile were found. (Later it turned out that explosives had been planted in the plane long before the crash - as part of a training program for sniffing dogs.) Versions spread about the involvement of government services in the explosion. The investigation was delayed due to the lack of an answer to the main question: what (or who) dropped the plane from the sky to the ground?

Shortly after the crash, Shanagan flew to New York to inspect the bodies of the dead and draw possible conclusions. Last spring I went to Carlsbad to meet him. I wanted to know how a person does this kind of work - scientifically and emotionally.
I had other questions as well. Shanagan knows all the ins and outs of the nightmare. He can tell in merciless medical detail what happens to people during various disasters. He knows how they usually die, whether they know what's going on, and how (in a low altitude crash) they could improve their chances of survival. I said I would take an hour from him, but I stayed with him for five hours.

A crashed plane can usually tell its own story. Sometimes this story can be heard literally—as a result of transcribing voice recordings in the cockpit, sometimes conclusions can be drawn from examining the broken and burned fragments. crashed plane. But when a plane crashes into the ocean, its history can be incomplete and uncoordinated. If the crash site is particularly deep or the current is too strong and chaotic, the black box may not be found at all, and the fragments raised to the surface may not be enough to unambiguously determine what happened on the plane a few minutes before the crash. In such situations, experts turn to what in textbooks on aviation pathological anatomy are called "human debris", that is, to the bodies of passengers. Unlike wings or fuselage fragments, bodies float to the surface of the water. Studying people's injuries (what their type, severity, which side of the body is affected) allows the expert to put together fragments of a terrible picture of what happened.

Shanagan is waiting for me at the airport. He's wearing Dockers boots, a short-sleeved shirt, and pilot-sized glasses. Hair neatly combed in the middle. They look like a wig, but they are real. He is polite, reserved and very pleasant, he reminds me of my friend Mike the pharmacist.

It doesn't look at all like the portrait I made in my head. I imagined a surly, unfeeling, perhaps verbose person. I planned to conduct an interview in the field, at the crash site of some plane. I imagined the two of us in a mortuary, temporarily built in a small-town dance hall or some university gym, he in a soiled lab coat, me with my notebook. But that was before I realized that Shanagan didn't do autopsies personally. This is done by a team of medical experts from a mortuary located near the crash site. Sometimes he does go to the site and examine the bodies for one reason or another, but still, he mostly works with ready-made autopsy results, correlating them with the passenger boarding plan to identify the location of the source of damage. He informs me that to see him at work. at the scene of the accident, it is probably necessary to wait several years, since the causes of most accidents are quite obvious and it is not necessary to study the bodies of the dead to clarify them.

When I tell him of my disappointment (because I can't report from the crash site), Shanagan hands me a book called Aerospace Pathology, which he assures me has pictures of things I could to see at the crash site. I open the book to the Body Position section. Scattered on the diagram showing the location of the aircraft fragments are small black dots. Lines are drawn from these points to descriptions that are outside the scheme: “brown leather shoes”, “co-pilot”, “fragment of the spine”, “stewardess”. Gradually, I get to the chapter that describes Shanaghan's work ("The nature of human injury in air crashes"). Photo captions remind researchers, for example, that "high heat can cause steam to form inside the skull, causing the skull to rupture, which can be confused with impact damage." It becomes clear to me that the black dots with captions give me quite a good idea of ​​the consequences of the disaster, as if I had visited the site of a plane crash.

In the event of a TWA 800 crash, Shanagan suspected a bomb explosion had caused the crash. He analyzed the nature of the damage to the bodies to prove that the plane had exploded. If he had found traces of explosives, he would have tried to find out where the bomb had been planted on the plane. He pulls a thick folder from his desk drawer and pulls out his group's report. Here - chaos and gore, the result of the major plane crash passenger aircraft in figures, diagrams, and diagrams. The nightmare has been transformed into something that can be discussed over coffee at the morning meeting of the National Transportation Safety Committee. “4:19. In surfaced victims, the predominance of right-sided injuries over left-sided ones. “4:28. Fractures of the hips and horizontal damage to the base of the seats. I ask Shanaghan whether a businesslike and detached view of the tragedy helps to suppress what seems to me a natural emotional experience. He looks down at his hands, fingers intertwined, resting on the Flight 800 case file.

“Maureen can tell you that I didn’t manage myself well in those days. Emotionally it was extremely difficult, especially due to the large number of young people on that plane. The French club of one of the universities flew to Paris. Young couples. It was very hard for all of us." Shanaghan adds that this is an atypical state of experts at the crash site. “In general, people don’t want to dive into tragedy too deeply, so jokes and free chatting is pretty common behavior. But not in this case."

For Shanagan, the most unpleasant thing about this case was that most of the bodies were practically intact. “The integrity of the bodies worries me more than its absence,” he says. Things that most of us find hard to look at - severed arms, legs, pieces of the body - for Shanagan, a fairly familiar sight. “In that case, it’s just cloth. You can make your thoughts flow in the right direction and do your job.” It's blood, but it doesn't cause sadness. You can get used to working with blood. But with broken lives, no. Shanagan works just like any pathologist. “You focus on individual parts, not on the person as a person. At autopsy, describe the eyes, then the mouth. You don't stand next to him and think that this man is the father of four children. This is the only way to suppress your emotions.”

It's funny, but it is the intactness of the bodies that can serve as the key to unraveling whether there was an explosion or not. We are on the sixteenth page of the report. Item 4.7: "Fragmentation of bodies." “People near the epicenter of the explosion are being torn apart,” Dennis tells me quietly. This man has an amazing ability to talk about such things in a way that is neither overly patronizing nor overly colorful. If there had been a bomb on the plane, Shanagan would have found a cluster of "heavily fragmented bodies" corresponding to the passengers in the explosion. But most of the bodies were intact, which is easy to see from the report if you know the color code used by the experts. To facilitate the work of people like Shanagan, who must analyze a large amount of information, medical experts use such a code. Specifically, the bodies of passengers on Flight 800 were labeled green (intact body), yellow (head crushed or one limb missing), blue (two limbs missing, head crushed or intact), or red (three or more limbs missing or complete body fragmentation).

Another way to confirm the presence of an explosion is to study the number and trajectory of the “foreign bodies” that have stuck into the bodies of the victims. This is a routine analysis that is performed using an X-ray machine as part of the investigation into the causes of any air crash. During the explosion, fragments of the bomb itself, as well as nearby objects, scatter to the sides, hitting people sitting around. The nature of the distribution of these foreign bodies may shed light on the question of whether there was a bomb, and if so, where. If the explosion occurred, for example, in the toilet on the right side of the aircraft, the people sitting facing the toilet would be injured on the front side of the torso. Passengers at the aisle on the opposite side would have been wounded in the right side. However, Shanagan did not find any injuries of this kind.

Some of the bodies bore traces of chemical burns. This served as the basis for the emergence of a version that the cause of the disaster was a collision with a rocket. It is true that chemical burns in aircraft crashes are usually caused by contact with highly corrosive fuels, but Shanaghan suspected that the burns were sustained by people after the plane hit the water. Fuel spilled on the surface of the water corrodes the backs of bodies floating on the surface, but not the faces. To finally confirm the correctness of his version, Shanagan checked that the chemical burns were only on the bodies that floated to the surface and only on the back. If the explosion had occurred in an airplane, the splattered fuel would have burned people's faces and sides, but not their backs, which were protected by the seatbacks. So, no evidence of a missile impact.

Shanagan also drew attention to thermal burns caused by flames. A diagram was attached to the report. Investigating the nature of the location of burns on the body (in most cases, the front part of the body was burned), he was able to trace the movement of fire through the aircraft. Then he found out how badly the seats of these passengers were burned - it turned out to be much stronger than the passengers themselves, which meant that people were pushed out of their seats and thrown out of the plane literally seconds after the fire started. A version began to take shape that the fuel tank in the wing had exploded. The explosion occurred far enough away from the passengers (and therefore the bodies remained intact), but it was strong enough to break the integrity of the aircraft to the point that it broke apart and people were pushed overboard.

I asked why the passengers were carried out of the plane, because they were wearing seat belts. Shanagan replied that if the integrity of the aircraft is violated, huge forces begin to act. Unlike a projectile explosion, the body usually remains intact, but a powerful wave is capable of pulling a person out of a chair. “These planes fly at over 500 kilometers an hour,” Shanaghan continues. - When a crack appears, the aerodynamic properties of the aircraft change. The motors are still pushing him forward, but he is losing his footing. It starts spinning with monstrous force. The crack widens, and in five or six seconds the plane falls apart. My theory is that the plane fell apart fairly quickly, the seatbacks fell off and people slipped out of the straps that held them in place.

The nature of the injuries on the passengers of Flight 800 confirmed his theory: most people had massive internal trauma, which is usually observed, in the words of Shanagan, with "extremely strong impact on the water." A person falling from a height hits the surface of the water and almost immediately stops, but his internal organs continue to move for a fraction of a second longer until they hit the wall of the corresponding body cavity, which at that moment began to return. Often in falls, the aorta ruptures, because one part of it is fixed in the body (and stops moving along with the body), while the other part, located closer to the heart, is free and stops moving a little later. The two parts of the aorta move in opposite directions, and the resulting shear forces cause it to rupture. Serious damage to the aorta was found in 73% of the passengers on Flight 800.

In addition, when a body falling from a great height hits the water, rib fractures often occur. This fact was documented by former employees of the Institute of Civil Aeromedicine Richard Snyder and Clyde Snow. In 1968, Snyder studied autopsies of 169 suicide bombers who had thrown themselves off the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. 85% had broken ribs, 15% had a broken spine, and only a third had broken limbs. By itself, a fracture of the ribs is not dangerous, but with a very strong blow, the ribs can pierce what is under them: the heart, lung, aorta. In 76% of the cases studied by Snyder and Snow, the ribs pierced the lung. The statistics in the case of the Flight 800 crash were very similar: most of those who died had some form of injury associated with a strong impact on the surface of the water. All had blunt chest injuries, 99% had broken ribs, 88% had torn lungs, and 73% had aortic rupture.

If most of the passengers died as a result of a strong impact on the surface of the water, does this mean that they were alive and understood what was happening to them during a three-minute fall from a height? Alive, perhaps. “If by life you mean the beating of the heart and breathing,” says Shanagan. “Yes, there must have been many.” Did they understand? Dennis thinks it's unlikely. “I think it's unlikely. Seats and passengers fly apart. I think people are completely disoriented.” Shanagan interviewed hundreds of car and plane crash survivors about what they saw and felt during the accident. “I came to the conclusion that these people did not fully understand that they were seriously injured. I found them quite aloof. They knew that some events were happening around, but they gave some unthinkable answer: “I knew that something was happening around, but I didn’t know what exactly. I didn’t feel that it concerned me, but, on the other hand, I understood that I was part of the events.

Knowing how many passengers on Flight 800 had fallen out of the plane in the crash, I wondered if any of them had even a slim chance of surviving. If you enter the water like a sports diver, is it possible to survive after falling from a plane from a great height? It happened at least once. In 1963, Richard Snyder studied cases of people surviving falling from great heights. In the work “Survival of people in free fall”, he cites the case when one person fell out of an airplane at a height of 10 km and survived, although he lived only half a day. Moreover, the poor fellow was not lucky - he did not fall into the water, but to the ground (however, when falling from such a height, the difference is already small). Snyder found that the speed of a person's movement when hitting the ground does not unambiguously predict the severity of the injury. He spoke to runaway lovers who were more seriously injured by falling down stairs than a thirty-six-year-old suicide who threw himself on concrete from a height of more than twenty meters. This man got up and went, and he needed nothing more than a band-aid and a visit to a psychotherapist.

Generally speaking, people who fall from airplanes usually don't fly anymore. According to Snyder's article, the maximum speed at which a person has a tangible chance of surviving when submerged feet first (the safest position) is about 100 km/h. Considering that the final speed of a falling body is 180 km/h and that a similar speed is already achieved when falling from a height of 150 meters, few people will be able to fall from a height of 8000 meters from an exploding plane, survive and then be interviewed by Dennis Shanagan.

Was Shanagan right about what happened to Flight 800? Yes. Gradually, all the main details of the aircraft were found, and his hypothesis was confirmed. The final conclusion was this: sparks from damaged electrical wiring ignited fuel vapors, which caused the explosion of one of the fuel tanks.

The unhappy science of human injury began in 1954 when British Comet planes for some unknown reason began to fall into the water. The first plane disappeared in January near the island of Elba, the second near Naples three months later. In both cases, due to the rather large depth of immersion of the wreckage of many parts of the fuselage, it was not possible to extract, so the experts had to study the "medical evidence", that is, examine the bodies of twenty-one passengers found on the surface of the water.

The studies were carried out at the Institute of Aviation Medicine of the British Royal air fleet at Farnborough under the leadership of Captain W. C. Stewart and Sir Harold E. Whittingham, Director of Medical Services of the national British Airline. Since Sir Harold had more than all possible titles (at least five, not counting the title of nobility, were indicated in the article published on the results of the study), I decided that it was he who supervised the work.
Sir Harold and his group immediately drew attention to the peculiarity of the damage to the bodies. All bodies had quite a few external injuries and at the same time very serious damage to internal organs, especially the lungs. It was known that such lung injuries as were found in the passengers of the Comet could be caused by three causes: a bomb explosion, sudden decompression (which occurs when the pressurization of the aircraft cabin is broken), and a fall from a very high altitude. In a catastrophe such as this, all three factors may have played a role. Until this point, the dead hadn't helped much in solving the mystery of the plane crash.
The first version, which began to be considered, was associated with a bomb explosion. But not a single body was burned, not a single body was found to have fragments of objects that could fly apart in an explosion, and not a single body, as Dennis Shanagan would have noted, was torn to pieces. So the idea of ​​a crazy and hateful ex-airline employee familiar with explosives was quickly dropped.

Then a group of researchers considered the version of the sudden depressurization of the cabin. Could this lead to such severe lung damage? To answer this question, the experts used guinea pigs and tested their reactions to rapid changes in atmospheric pressure, from pressure at sea level to pressure at an altitude of 10,000 m. According to Sir Harold, “the guinea pigs were somewhat respiratory failure." Other experimental data, obtained both in animals and in humans, similarly showed only a small negative effect of pressure changes, which in no way reflected the condition of the light passengers of the Comet.

As a result, only the latest version, “extremely strong impact on the water,” could be considered as the cause of the death of the passengers of the aircraft, and the collapse of the hull at high altitude, possibly due to some structural defect, could be considered as the cause of the disaster. Because Richard Snyder wrote Fatal Injuries Resulting from Extreme Water Impact only 14 years after the events, the Farnborough team once again had to turn to guinea pigs for help. Sir Harold wanted to establish exactly what happens to the lungs when a body hits water at top speed. When I first encountered animals in the text, I imagined Sir Harold heading for the Dover Rocks with a cage of rodents and throwing innocent animals into the water where his comrades were waiting in a rowboat with nets. However, Sir Harold did a more meaningful thing: he and his assistants created a "vertical catapult" that allows you to achieve the required speed at a much shorter distance. “Guinea pigs,” he wrote, “were attached with adhesive tape to the bottom surface of the carrier, so that when it stopped at the bottom position of its trajectory, the animals flew belly forward from a height of about 80 cm and fell into the water.” I can well imagine what a boy Sir Harold was as a child.

In short, the lungs of the ejected guinea pigs closely resembled those of the Comet's passengers. The researchers concluded that the planes broke apart at high altitude, causing most of the passengers to fall out of them and fall into the sea. To understand where the fuselage cracked, the researchers paid attention to whether the passengers who were lifted from the surface of the water were dressed or undressed. According to Sir Harold's theory, a person hitting the water when falling from a height of several kilometers should have lost his clothes, but a person falling into the water from the same height inside a large fragment of the fuselage should have remained dressed. Therefore, the researchers tried to establish the collapse line of the aircraft along the border between naked and dressed passengers. In the cases of both aircraft, the people whose seats were at the rear of the aircraft should have been found clothed, while the passengers closest to the cockpit would have been found naked or with most of their clothes off.

To prove this theory, Sir Harold lacked one thing: there was no evidence that a person loses clothes when falling into water from a great height. Sir Harold again undertook pioneering research. Although I would love to tell you about how guinea pigs, dressed in 1950s wool suits and dresses, took part in the next round of Farnborough trials, unfortunately guinea pigs were not used in this part of the study. Several fully dressed mannequins* were dropped into the sea from a Royal Aircraft Center aircraft. As Sir Harold expected, they lost their clothes when they hit the water, and this fact was confirmed by the investigator Gary Erickson, who performed the autopsy of suicides who threw themselves into the water from the Golden Gate Bridge. As he told me, even when falling from a height of only 75 m, "the shoes usually fly off, the trousers are torn along the gusset, the back pockets are torn off."

*You may be interested, as I was wondering, if human corpses have ever been used to reproduce the results of people falling from great heights. The manuscripts of two papers that brought me closest to this topic were J. K. Earley's "Body Terminal Velocity", dated 1964, and J. S. Cotner's "Analysis of the influence of air resistance on the rate of fall of human bodies" (Analysis of Air Resistance Effects on the Velocity of Falling Human Bodies) from 1962 Both articles, unfortunately, were not published. However, I know that if J.K. Earley had used dummies in his research, he would have written the word "dummies" in the title of the article, so I suspect that several bodies donated for scientific purposes did indeed jump into the water from height. — Note. ed.

In the end, a significant part of the Comet fragments was brought to the surface, and Sir Harold's theory was confirmed. The collapse of the fuselage in both cases actually occurred in the air. Hats off to Sir Harold and the Farnborough guinea pigs.
Dennis and I are having lunch at an Italian restaurant on the beach. We are the only visitors and therefore we can calmly talk at the table. When the waiter comes over to refill our water, I trail off as if we're talking about something secret or very personal. Shanagan doesn't seem to care. The waiter peppers my salad endlessly, while Dennis says that "...a specialized trawler was used to extract the small remains."

I ask Dennis how he can, knowing what he knows and seeing what he sees, still fly airplanes. He replies that not all accidents happen at an altitude of 10,000 m. Most accidents occur during takeoff, landing or near the surface of the earth, and in this case, in his opinion, the potential probability of survival is from 80 to 85%.

For me, the key word here is the word "potential". This means that if everything goes according to an evacuation plan approved by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), there is an 80-85% chance that you will survive. Federal law requires aircraft manufacturers to provide the ability to evacuate all passengers through half of the aircraft's emergency exits in 90 seconds. Unfortunately, in a real situation, evacuation rarely goes according to plan. “When you look at disasters where people can be saved, it's rare that even half of the emergency exits are open,” says Shanaghan. “Plus, there is chaos and panic on the plane.” Shanagan gives the example of the Delta plane crash in Dallas. “In this accident, it was quite possible to save all the people. People received very few injuries. But many died in the fire. They crowded around the emergency exits, but they couldn't open them." Fire is the number one killer in plane crashes. It does not take a strong blow to explode the fuel tank and the fire engulfed the entire aircraft. Passengers die of suffocation as the air becomes scalding hot and filled with toxic smoke from the burning skin of the aircraft. People also die because they break their legs, crashing into the seat in front of them, and cannot crawl to the exit. Passengers cannot follow the evacuation plan in the required order: they run in panic, pushing and trampling each other*.

* Here lies the secret to surviving such catastrophes: you have to be a man. In a 1970 Institute of Civil Aeromedicine analysis of three aircraft crashes using an emergency evacuation system, the most important factor contributing to human survival was gender (the second most important factor, following the proximity of the passenger seat to the passenger seat). emergency exit). Adult males have a significantly higher chance of being saved. Why? Probably because they are capable of sweeping everyone else out of the way. — Note. ed.

Can manufacturers make their planes less flammable? Of course they can. They can design more emergency exits, but they don't want to because it will lead to a reduction in seats in the cabin and lower income. They can install water sprinklers or shock-resistant systems to protect fuel tanks, as in military helicopters. But they don’t want to do that either, because it will make the plane heavier, and more weight means more fuel consumption.

Who decides to sacrifice human lives but save money? Allegedly the Federal Aviation Agency. The problem is that most aircraft safety improvements are evaluated in terms of cost-benefit. To quantify the "benefit", each life saved is expressed in dollar terms. As calculated in 1991 by the US Institute for Urban Development, each person is worth $2.7 million. “This is the financial expression of the death of a person and its impact on society,” FAA spokesman Van Goody told me. Although this figure greatly exceeds the cost of raw materials, the numbers in the “benefit” column rarely rise to such levels as to surpass the cost of manufacturing aircraft. To explain his words, Goody used the example of three-point seat belts (which, like in a car, are thrown both over the waist and over the shoulder). “Well, okay, the agency will say, we will improve seat belts and thus save fifteen lives in the next twenty years: fifteen times two million dollars equals thirty million. Manufacturers will come and say: to introduce such a security system, we need six hundred and sixty-nine million dollars. Here are the shoulder straps.

Why doesn't the FAA say, “Expensive. But are you still going to release them? For the same reason it took the government 15 years to require airbags in cars. Government regulators have no teeth. “If the FAA wants to introduce new rules, it should provide the industry with a cost-benefit analysis and wait for a response,” says Shanaghan. - If the industrialists do not like the deal, they go to their congressman. If you represent the Boeing Company, you have tremendous influence in Congress.”*

*It is for this reason that modern aircraft do not have airbags. Believe it or not, an airbag system for aircraft (called an airstop restraint system) was designed; it consists of three parts protecting the legs, the seat underneath and the chest. In 1964, the FAA even tested the system on a DC-7 using dummies, causing the plane to crash into the ground near Phoenix, Arizona. While the control dummy, wearing the lap belt, was crushed and lost its head, the dummy equipped with the new safety system was in excellent condition. The designers drew on stories from World War II combat aircraft pilots who inflated their life jackets. — Note. ed. Starting in 2001, to improve the safety of passengers, aircraft began to install shoulder belts and airbags. At the end of 2010, airbags were installed on 60 airlines around the world, and this figure is constantly growing. — Note. per.

In the FAA's defense, the agency recently approved the introduction of a new system that pumps nitrogen-enriched air into the fuel tanks, which reduces the oxygen content in the fuel and, therefore, the likelihood of an explosion that led, for example, to the TWA 800 flight.

I ask Dennis for some advice to those passengers who, after reading this book, every time they board an airplane, will think about whether they will end their lives trampled by other passengers at the emergency exit door. He says that best advice- stick to common sense. Sit closer to the emergency exit. In case of fire, bend as low as possible to avoid hot air and smoke. Hold your breath as long as possible so as not to burn your lungs and inhale toxic gases. Shanagan himself prefers window seats, as passengers sitting by the aisle more likely can be hit on the head by bags falling from the storage compartment above the seats, which can open even with a slight push.

As we wait for the waiter with the bill, I ask Shanagan the question he's been asked at every cocktail for the past twenty years: Are the passengers in the front or the back more likely to survive a plane crash? “It depends,” he patiently replies, “what type of accident you are talking about.” I'll reformulate the question. If he has the opportunity to choose his seat on the plane, where does he sit?

“First grade,” he replies.