Collision on Tenerife : The How and Why of the World's Worst Aviation Disaster (9781682617748) by Ziomek Jon; Hopkins Caroline (CON)

Author:Ziomek, Jon; Hopkins, Caroline (CON) [Ziomek, Jon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Smashwords
Published: 2018-08-15T16:00:00+00:00

The crashes took place during the 1960s. They represented a mix of severity. The Denver crash had comparatively few injuries and a comparatively calm and orderly evacuation; the Salt Lake City crash was of a middle-range of intensity and fatalities; and the Rome disaster saw fire and explosions disrupt the evacuation process, severely limiting the number of those who safely got out of the plane. For their study, Snow and his colleagues studied body locations in the jets.

The “survivability” of those accidents was found to be dependent on three factors: location of seat, age of passenger, and gender.

The first factor was the distance a person sat from an emergency exit, which seems logical. The farther away a passenger was from a usable exit, the harder it was to reach because of the amount of available time after the crash to get out. A computation in the Snow study showed that those who survived had to go an average of half as many rows to get to the nearest exit as those who died. For first-class passengers, the seat-to-exit distance was less than four rows (about two and a half rows), and for economy-class passengers, the seat-to-exit distance was about four rows for the surviving passengers and seven to nine rows for the fatalities.

Intriguingly, they found that several passengers gave up their initial proximity to an exit in order to use, or try to use, an exit farther away. This may have been because those passengers hadn’t looked around and identified nearby exits in front and back of them. In a moment of crisis, they acted in what seemed like a logical way – they tried to get out the same way they got in.

The Snow report also was an early study demonstrating that some people act irrationally in a crisis.

In one example in the Salt Lake City crash, a man dropped to his hands and knees in the center aisle after the plane had skidded to a stop. He was keeping himself low to avoid smoke in the cabin. That was sensible. However, he then crawled through the legs of those standing in the aisle and kept going all the way forward into the cockpit, in the process passing right by the open front door of the aircraft. He tried to kick out a window in the cockpit – unsuccessfully – then got back down on his hands and knees, and crawled back into the passenger cabin, again passing by the opened door. A crew member finally saw the man and only just in time pulled him out of the burning wreckage.

Other people never noticed that they were sitting adjacent to window exits and instead tried to make their way up the aisles to a door. In the Salt Lake City crash, several bodies were found just forward of the rear galley door, which had been opened by a flight attendant shortly after the plane had come to rest. But by then, most people were crowding forward in the aisle

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