Friday, Aug 29, 2008
Still ignoring those flight-attendant safety lectures? The pilot is displeased, and presents a refresher course in awful airplane crashes, in the water and on the land.
Mar 19, 2004 | I'd like to begin by doing something I don't normally do, per common sense and editorial prescription, which is recycle an old Q&A subject. I'm doing it because of the shocking frequency -- to me anyway -- with which this topic appears, week after week, in my mailbox.
I'm speaking of the proverbial "water landing." Ditchings. Anything and everything to do with life rafts, seat cushions, and the idea of an airplane coming into inadvertent contact with lake, river or sea. There seems to be a consensus that the rarity of such instances invalidates the point and purpose of the pre-departure cabin briefing. The bulk of your letters are sarcastically incredulous: "Come on, has anybody ever used a floatation device to survive? Come on." And so on. Floatation devices? Why bother?
In the movie "Airport '77," a Boeing 747 crashes into the ocean and sinks to the bottom intact, the passengers still alive and encased inside a sort of inside-out aquarium. Guess I can't blame you, in a way, for finding the whole notion silly. Statistics argue the extreme improbability of going down over water while, just in case, Hollywood paints its usual cartoonish and completely non-believable picture of what might happen. So the next time the crew is going through that campy vest drill, best to roll your eyes and ignore it, correct?
Wrong.
"Water landing" is a snarky contradiction, but over the decades a handful of airliners have found themselves, through one mishap or another, floating. At least two of these -- the 1970 ditching of a DC-9 in the Caribbean, and a 1963 Aeroflot splashdown near Leningrad, were controlled impacts with many survivors.
But, you'll argue, why waste our time when a flight is over land the whole way? Well, keep in mind that planes have overshot, undershot, or otherwise parted company with runways and ended up in the harbor at a coastal airport, sometimes without leaving the ground. If you're flying from New York to Phoenix and you're smirking as the attendant blows into that plastic tube, remember that twice since the late 1980s jets went off the end of a runway at La Guardia and ended up in the bay. Both crashes left people very much alive and very much swimming.
In December 2002, in a discussion of "the realities of air safety," The Economist, normally among the most factually credible magazines in the world, quoted a Mr. Jackson of "Jane's All the World's Aircraft" who stated: "No large airliner has ever made an emergency landing on water." While you can argue the definition of "large," or "landing," this is untrue. The Economist continued, "So the life jackets, with their little whistles and lights that come on when in contact with water, have little purpose other than to make passengers feel better." The various accoutrements of the onboard floatation devices might indeed be a bit of overkill (the larger rafts contain everything from signal mirrors to fishing line and hooks), but this unctuous remark also is false. In the above cases and others, vests and rafts were put to good use by passengers who needed them.
I'd bet the house, if I had one, that it won't ever happen, but if you're in such an accident and have, as will be the case, not paid attention to the briefing, do not inflate your vest while still inside the plane, despite the temptation to do so. When an Ethiopian Airlines 767 ditched off the Comoros Islands after a skyjacking in 1996, several people who'd pre-inflated their vests were unable to move freely and escape the rising water. The devices are designed to provide buoyancy around the neck even if punctured, so if you're unconscious and haven't yet discharged the little cylinder, you'll still float with your head above the surface.
There's an essential difference between a plummeting, disintegrative crash, and a controlled ditching. Alas, the ones that stick in our minds and make the most memorable headlines tend to fall in the former category. Most recently, this past January, was the yet unsolved crash of Flash Airlines Flight 504 -- an Egyptian charter flight that plunged into the Red Sea after takeoff from the Sinai resort town of Sharm-el-Sheik.
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