Many people are afraid of flying by air, but this means of transportation is the fastest and most convenient.
Let's consider what a person feels when a plane crashes. The most reliable information about detailed experiences can be obtained from people who have experienced this experience themselves.
Every accident is the result of several causes, the main one of which is human factor. That is, traditionally as the cause of the fall air transport Usually it is a mistake made by the crew.
Another common reason is aviation terrorism, which is much less common. Let's look at the statistics on this matter:
- 60% — accidents caused by pilot errors;
- 20% — difficulties associated with technical problems;
- 15% — situations that emerged during weather conditions;
- 5% — aviation terrorism and other factors.
The main cause of accidents is the human factor
The most common mistakes made by air transport employees:
- Failure to comply with piloting procedures according to regulations.
- Insufficiently high level of pilot qualifications.
- Error in operation of navigation devices.
- Failure to comply with maintenance rules.
- Erroneous situations that arose due to the fault of ground controllers.
- Problems of the psychological state of the pilot and assistant.
Most often, accidents occur during takeoff or landing of an airplane., while the vehicle is in controlled control, but loses spatial orientation.
Human feelings when a plane crashes
As scientific research has shown, when overload occurs vehicle the person is unlikely to clearly remember the events. This is due to increased protection of consciousness.
Passengers will remember only the first seconds, when the plane began to fall, and in the next stages the body’s defensive reaction will turn on and consciousness will turn off.
According to research, during the collision with the ground, not a single person was conscious, which suggests that he could not experience feelings.
This fact was confirmed by people who managed to survive such a crash. When asked how the passengers of the falling plane felt, they replied that they only remembered shaking and overload.
Passengers' feelings when the cabin is depressurized
The pressure on such a large surface takes on much lower values than above its surface, as do the temperature indicators. Lack of oxygen prevents the body from functioning normally.
Modern cinema has significantly influenced public consciousness, showing that even a small hole on the surface of the skin leads to the death of the entire passenger train.
In fact, it's the other way around. Of course, damage to the skin is not normal, but this does not indicate the catastrophic scale of the problem.
The main problem with cabin depressurization is lack of oxygen.. If every “traveler” is fastened according to the rules of the instructions, no serious complications should arise.
Moreover, the aircraft is designed to maintain an integral structure and is able to complete the flight it has begun. The main thing is to be able to promptly notice the drop in pressure and the fact that the oxygen level has decreased.
In case of depressurization, it is necessary to wear oxygen masks
What happens to people when they collide with the ground?
If the landing is controlled, passengers may be conscious, but it is cloudy. More often than not, the answer to the question of how people feel when a plane crashes is “nothing.”
We have already noted that at altitude, the body’s defense reaction is activated and it goes into temporary hibernation until the situation stabilizes.
Involuntarily, people may feel shaking and slight fear.
According to the testimony of those who managed to survive the airliner crash, they remember practically nothing.
Actions of the crew during an airplane crash
To create favorable conditions for the comfortable well-being of passengers, it is necessary to carry out a number of measures.
Firstly, prevent oxygen starvation among passengers by offering them wear special masks. Breathing may become rapid and people may feel slightly dizzy. Then the brain cells gradually die, so taking the right actions in a timely manner is designed to prevent death.
Secondly, when the first signs of problems are detected pilots descend to a relatively safe altitude of 3-4 km. At this level, a sufficient amount of oxygen is assumed for proper breathing and normal functioning of the body.
After the situation normalizes, it is necessary to make a decision on further actions. As a rule, this is an emergency landing at a nearby port.
Most airplane accidents occur during takeoff or landing.
What passengers should do
The behavior of passengers during a crash plays an important role.. We looked at what happens to people during a plane crash.
Passengers facing decompression factors must adhere to the following rules:
- Keep calm and do not create panic.
- Follow everything the crew says. Listen carefully to instructions from staff.
- Wear oxygen masks and, if necessary, help others perform this task.
- Buckle up and sit quietly in your seat during the flight, which will avoid traumatic consequences in the turbulence zone.
Is it possible to survive a plane crash?
In addition to the question of how a person feels during a plane crash when falling, another question involuntarily arises: “Is it possible to survive in this situation?” As practice shows, of course, it is possible. But provided that the pilots noticed the problems in a timely manner and began to fix them.
Compliance and the absence of a panic state guarantees the calm and well-being of passengers.
Despite the fact that thousands of times more people die in car accidents every year than in airplane crashes, the fear of flying lives in the public consciousness. First of all, this is explained by the scale of the tragedies - a fallen airliner means tens and hundreds of simultaneous deaths. This is much more shocking than several thousand reports of fatal accidents spread over a month.
The second reason for fear of a plane crash is the awareness of one’s own helplessness and inability to somehow influence the course of events. This is almost always true. However, the history of aeronautics has accumulated a small number of exceptions in which people survived falling with the plane (or its debris) from a height of several kilometers without a parachute. These cases are so few that many of them have their own Wikipedia pages.
Wreck Rider
Vesna Vulović, a flight attendant at Jugoslovenski Aerotransport (today called Air Serbia), holds the world record for surviving a free fall without a parachute. She entered the Guinness Book of Records because she survived the explosion of a DC-9 plane at an altitude of 10,160 meters.
At the time of the explosion, Vesna was working with passengers. She immediately lost consciousness, so she did not remember either the moment of the disaster or its details. Because of this, the flight attendant did not develop a fear of flying - she perceived all the circumstances from other people’s words. It turned out that at the time of the destruction of the plane, Vulovich was pinned between the seat, the body of another crew member and the buffet cart. In this form, the debris fell onto the snow-covered mountainside and slid along it until it came to a complete stop.
Vesna remained alive, although she received serious injuries - she broke the base of her skull, three vertebrae, both legs and her pelvis. For 10 months, the girl’s lower body was paralyzed; in total, treatment took almost 1.5 years.
After recovery, Vulovich tried to return to her previous job, but she was not allowed to fly and was given a position in the airline office.
Target selection
Surviving like Vesna Vulovich in a cocoon of debris is much easier than in solo free flight. However, the second case also has its own surprising examples. One of them dates back to 1943, when US military pilot Alan Magee flew over France in a heavy four-engine B-17 bomber. At an altitude of 6 km he was thrown out of the plane, and the glass roof of the station slowed his fall. As a result, Magee fell on the stone floor, remained alive and was immediately captured by the Germans, shocked by what he saw.
A great fall target would be a large haystack. There are several known cases of people surviving plane crashes if densely growing bushes got in their way. A dense forest also gives some chances, but there is a risk of running into branches.
The ideal option for a falling person would be snow or a swamp. A soft and compressible environment that absorbs the inertia accumulated during the flight to the center of the earth, under a successful combination of circumstances, can make injuries compatible with life.
There is almost no chance of survival if you fall onto the surface of the water. Water is practically not compressed, so the result of contact with it will be the same as when colliding with concrete.
Sometimes the most unexpected objects can bring salvation. One of the main things skydiving enthusiasts are taught is to stay away from power lines. However, there is a known case when it was a high-voltage line that saved the life of a skydiver who found himself in free flight due to a parachute that did not open. It hit the wires, bounced back and fell to the ground from a height of several tens of meters.
Pilots and children
Statistics on survival in plane crashes show that crew members and passengers under age are much more likely to cheat death. The situation with pilots is clear - the passive safety systems in their cockpit are more reliable than those of other passengers.
Why children survive more often than others is not completely clear. However, researchers have established several reliable reasons for this issue:
- increased bone flexibility, general muscle relaxation and a higher percentage of subcutaneous fat, which protects internal organs from injury like a pillow;
- short stature, due to which the head is covered by the back of the chair from flying debris. This is extremely important, since the main cause of death in plane crashes is brain injury;
- smaller body size, reducing the likelihood of running into some sharp object at the moment of landing.
Invincible fortitude
A successful landing does not always mean a positive outcome. Not every miraculously surviving person is instantly found by well-meaning people local residents. For example, in 1971, over the Amazon at an altitude of 3,200 meters, a Lockheed Electra aircraft collapsed due to a fire caused by lightning striking a wing with a fuel tank. 17-year-old German Juliana Kopke came to her senses in the jungle, strapped to a chair. She was injured, but could move.
The girl remembered the words of her biologist father, who said that even in the impenetrable jungle you can always find people if you follow the flow of water. Juliana walked along the forest streams, which gradually turned into rivers. With a broken collarbone, a bag of sweets and a stick with which she dispersed stingrays in shallow water, the girl came out to people 9 days later. In Italy, the film “Miracles Still Happen” (1974) was made based on this story.
There were 92 people on board, including Kopke. It was subsequently established that besides her, 14 more people survived the fall. However, over the next few days, they all died before rescuers found them.
An episode from the film “Miracles Still Happen” saved the life of Larisa Savitskaya, who in 1981 flew with her husband from honeymoon flight Komsomolsk-on-Amur - Blagoveshchensk. At an altitude of 5,200 meters, a passenger An-24 collided with a Tu-16K bomber.
Larisa and her husband were sitting in the back of the plane. The fuselage broke right in front of her seat, and the girl was thrown into the aisle. At that moment, she remembered the film about Julian Kopka, who during the crash reached a chair, pressed herself into it and survived. Savitskaya did the same. Part of the plane's body, in which the girl remained, fell onto a birch grove that softened the blow. She was in the fall for about 8 minutes. Larisa was the only survivor; she received serious injuries, but remained conscious and retained the ability to move independently.
Savitskaya's surname is included twice in the Russian version of the Guinness Book of Records. She is listed as the person who survived the fall from the greatest height. The second record is rather sad - Larisa became the one who received minimal compensation for physical damage. She was paid only 75 rubles - that’s exactly how much, according to State Insurance standards, survivors of a plane crash were then entitled to.
I have always been interested in what people experience in a falling plane. Summarizing the experience of eyewitnesses who survived plane crashes, we can draw one interesting conclusion - the devil is not as terrible as he is painted...
First, be more afraid when driving to the airport. In 2014, over 33 million flights were made in the world, 21 plane crashes occurred (and most of the troubles in the sky occur in 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 road accidents, and according to WHO, 1.2 million people die in road accidents in the world every year and about 50 million are injured.
Secondly, judging by the statistics, your chances of dying on an escalator in the subway or contracting AIDS are much greater than dying 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 to 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 carried out here, but 43% of plane crashes have occurred!
Thirdly, under severe overloads, you will not remember anything According to research by the Interstate Aviation Committee, the consciousness of a person in a falling plane is switched off. In most cases - in the very first seconds of the fall. At the moment of impact with the ground there is not a single person in the cabin who is conscious. As they say, the body’s defense reaction is triggered. This thesis is confirmed by those who managed to survive plane crashes. Silence also accompanies minor air incidents, video selection
Fourth, the experience of survivors of plane crashes. The story of Larisa Savitskaya is included in the Guinness Book of Records. In 1981, at an altitude of 5220 meters, the An-24 plane in which she was flying collided with a military bomber. 37 people died in that disaster. Only Larisa managed to survive.
I was 20 years old then,” says Larisa Savitskaya. - Volodya, my husband, and I were flying from Komsomolsk-on-Amur to Blagoveshchensk. After takeoff, I immediately fell asleep. And I woke up from noise and screams. My face burned with cold. Then they told me that our plane’s wings were cut off and the roof was 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 was gushing down his face. I somehow immediately realized that he was dead. And she prepared to die too. Then the plane fell apart and I lost consciousness. When I came to my senses, I was surprised that I was still alive. I felt like I was lying on something hard. It turned out to be in the aisle between the chairs. And next to it is a 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 I remembered was an episode from an Italian film, where a girl, after a plane crash, soared in the sky among the clouds, and then, falling into the jungle, remained alive. I didn't expect to survive. I just wanted to die without suffering. I noticed the rungs 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 was near the rift), sat down in the chair, grabbed the armrests and rested her feet on the floor. All this was done automatically. Then I look - the ground. 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 there was a loss of memory. 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 chairs lay a dead man and woman...
Later it was established that the piece of the plane, four meters long and three meters wide, on which Savitskaya fell, glided 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 the spine. You can’t go with such injuries. But Larisa refused the stretcher and walked to 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 flies calmly on airplanes.
Another case confirms the blackout. Arina Vinogradova is one of the two surviving flight attendants of the Il-86 plane, which in 2002, barely taking off, crashed 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 flashes before your eyes. This didn’t happen to me,” Arina tells Izvestia. - Tanya and I were sitting in the first row of the third salon, near emergency exit, but not in service seats, but in passenger seats. Tanya is opposite me. The flight was technical - we just needed to return to Pulkovo. At some point the plane began to shake. This happens with 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 have time to get scared. Consciousness instantly floated away somewhere, and I fell into a black void. I woke up from a sharp jolt. At first I didn’t understand anything. Then I gradually figured it out. It turned out that I was lying on a warm engine, littered with chairs. I couldn't unfasten myself. She started screaming, pounding on the metal and disturbing Tanya, who then raised her head and then lost consciousness again. The firefighters pulled us out and took us to different hospitals.
Arina still works as a flight attendant. The plane crash, she said, did not leave any trauma in her soul. However, what happened had a very strong impact on Tatyana Moiseeva. Since then, she no longer flies, although she has not left aviation.
Fifth, a plane crash is a positive experience for survivors! Scientists have come to a unique conclusion: people who survived plane crashes subsequently turned out to be healthier from a psychological point of view. They showed less worry, anxiety, did not become depressed and did not experience post-traumatic stress, unlike 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 sat in the front row on the plane that made emergency landing into the Hudson River in New York in January 2009. You will find out what thoughts came to his mind while the doomed plane was falling down...
Still afraid of flying?-)
Original taken from valkiriarf What the bodies of passengers can tell about the plane crash
Outside the black box
Dennis Shanahan works out of a spacious second-floor space in the home he shares with his wife, Maureen, a ten-minute drive from downtown Carlsbad, California. He has a quiet, sunlit office that gives no clue as to the terrible work being done here. Shanaghan is a personal injury expert. He devotes a significant part of his time to studying wounds and fractures in living people. He is invited for consultations by companies that produce cars, whose clients sue on the basis of dubious arguments (“the seat belt broke,” “I wasn’t driving,” etc.), which can be verified by the nature of their injuries. But at the same time he is dealing with dead bodies. In particular, he took part in the investigation into the circumstances of the Trans World Airlines Flight 800 crash.
Airplane taking off from international airport named after John F. Kennedy on July 17, 1996 in Paris, exploded in the air over Atlantic Ocean in the East Morich, New York area. Eyewitness accounts were conflicting. Some claimed they saw the plane hit by a missile. Traces of explosives were found in the wreckage, but no traces of a projectile were found. (It later turned out that explosives had been planted on the plane long before the crash, as part of a training program for sniffing dogs.) Versions circulated that government services were involved 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?
Soon after the crash, Shanahan flew to New York to examine the bodies of the victims 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 too. Shanagan knows 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 is happening, and how (in a low-altitude crash) they could improve their chances of survival. I said that I would take an hour of his time, but I stayed with him for five hours.
A crashed plane usually has a story to tell. Sometimes this story can be heard literally - as a result of transcribing recordings of voices in the cockpit, sometimes conclusions can be drawn as a result of examining the broken and burned fragments of the crashed aircraft. But when a plane crashes into the ocean, its story can be incomplete and awkward. 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, specialists turn to what textbooks on aviation pathology call “human debris,” that is, the bodies of passengers. Unlike wings or fuselage fragments, bodies float to the surface of the water. Studying the injuries people received (what their type, severity, which side of the body was affected) allows the expert to put together the fragments of the terrible picture of what happened.
Shanagan is waiting for me at the airport. He wears Dockers boots, a short-sleeved shirt and pilot-style glasses. The hair is neatly combed into the parting. They look like a wig, but they are real. He is polite, reserved and very pleasant, reminds me of my pharmacist friend Mike.
He doesn't look anything like the portrait I had in my head. I imagined an unfriendly, insensitive, perhaps verbose person. I planned to conduct the interview in the field, at the site of a plane crash. I imagined the two of us in a morgue, temporarily set up in a small-town dance hall or some university gym: him in a stained lab coat, me with my notepad. But that was before I realized that Shanaghan doesn't personally autopsy bodies. This is done by a group of medical experts from a morgue located near the crash site. Sometimes he does go to the scene and examine the bodies for one purpose or another, but most of the time he works with the finished autopsy results, correlating them with the passenger boarding pattern to identify the location of the source of damage. He tells 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 disasters 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 in not being able to report from the crash site, Shanahan hands me a book called Aerospace Pathology, which he assures me contains photographs of things I could would like to see the plane crash site. I open the book to the "Location of Bodies" section. There are small black dots scattered across the diagram showing the location of the aircraft fragments. From these points lines are drawn to descriptions outside the diagram: “brown leather shoes”, “co-pilot”, “spine fragment”, “stewardess”. Gradually I get to the chapter that describes Shanaghan's work ("Injury Patterns in Aircraft Accidents"). Photo captions remind researchers, for example, that "extreme heat can cause steam to form inside the skull, causing skull rupture, which can be confused with impact damage." It becomes clear to me that the black dots with captions give me quite a sufficient understanding of the consequences of the disaster, as if I had visited the site of the plane crash.
In the case of the TWA 800 crash, Shanahan suspected that the crash was caused by a bomb explosion. He analyzed the nature of the damage to the bodies to prove that an explosion had occurred in the plane. If he had found traces of explosives, he would have tried to determine where the bomb was planted on the plane. He takes a thick folder from his desk drawer and pulls out his group's report. Here is chaos and gore, the result of the worst plane crash ever. passenger plane in numbers, diagrams, and diagrams. The nightmare has been transformed into something that can be discussed over coffee at a morning meeting. National Committee on transport safety. “4:19. The surfaced victims had a 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 Shanahan whether a matter-of-fact, detached view of tragedy helps suppress what I believe is a natural emotional experience. He looks down at his intertwined hands resting on the Flight 800 case file.
“Maureen can tell you that I didn’t handle 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 was flying to Paris. Young couples. It was very difficult for all of us." Shanahan adds that this is not a typical state for experts at the scene of a plane crash. “In general, people don't want to delve too deeply into tragedy, so jokes and free communication are quite 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 intactness of bodies bothers me more than the absence of it,” he states. Things that are difficult for most of us to look at - severed arms, legs, pieces of the body - are a fairly familiar sight for Shanagan. “In that case, it’s just fabric. You can force your thoughts to flow in the right direction and do your work.” It is blood, but it does not cause sadness. You can get used to working with blood. But with broken lives, no. Shanahan works like any pathologist. “You concentrate on individual parts, not on the person as an individual. During the autopsy, you 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 solving whether there was an explosion or not. We are on page sixteen of the report. Clause 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 these things in a way that is neither overly patronizing nor overly colorful. If there had been a bomb on the plane, Shanahan should have discovered a cluster of "highly fragmented bodies" consistent with passengers who were at the site of 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 make the job easier for people like Shanahan, who must analyze large amounts of information, medical experts use code like this. Specifically, the bodies of Flight 800 passengers were coded green (intact body), yellow (head broken or one limb missing), blue (two limbs missing, head broken 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 foreign bodies embedded in the victims' bodies. This is a routine test performed using an X-ray machine as part of the investigation into the cause of any plane crash. When it explodes, fragments of the bomb itself, as well as nearby objects, fly apart, hitting people sitting around. The distribution pattern of these foreign bodies may shed light on the question of whether there was a bomb, and if so, where. If an explosion occurred, for example, in the toilet on the right side of the aircraft, people sitting facing the toilet would suffer injuries to the front side of their torso. Passengers on the opposite side of the aisle would have been shot in the right side. However, Shanagan did not find any injuries of this kind.
Some of the bodies showed signs of chemical burns. This served as the basis for the version that the cause of the disaster was a collision with a missile. It is true that chemical burns in plane crashes are usually caused by contact with highly corrosive fuel, but Shanahan 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 their faces. To finally confirm the correctness of his version, Shanahan checked that only the bodies that surfaced had chemical burns and only on the back. If the explosion had occurred on an airplane, the spraying fuel would have burned people's faces and sides, but not their backs, which were protected by the seat backs. So, no evidence of a missile collision.
Shanahan also looked at thermal burns caused by the flames. A diagram was attached to the report. By examining the location of the burns on the body (in most cases the front part of the body was burned), he was able to trace the movement of the fire throughout the aircraft. He then found out how badly the seats of these passengers were burned - it turned out to be much worse 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 broke out. A theory began to emerge that the fuel tank in the wing had exploded. The explosion occurred far enough away from the passengers (so the bodies remained intact), but it was strong enough to compromise the integrity of the plane 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. Shanahan replied that when the integrity of the aircraft is compromised, enormous forces begin to act. Unlike a shell explosion, the body usually remains intact, but a powerful wave can tear a person out of his chair. “Such planes fly at speeds of over five hundred kilometers per hour,” Shanagan continues. “When a crack appears, the aerodynamic properties of the aircraft change. The motors still push it forward, but it loses stability. It begins to spin with monstrous force. The crack widens and within five or six seconds the plane falls apart. My theory is that the plane fell apart quite quickly, the seat backs fell off, and people slipped out of the straps securing them.
The nature of the injuries on Flight 800 confirmed his theory: most people suffered massive internal trauma, the type typically seen in what Shanaghan calls "extremely hard impact with water." A person falling from a height hits the surface of the water and stops almost immediately, 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 move back. Often during falls, the aorta ruptures, since one part of it is fixed in the body (and stops moving along with the body), and 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 lead to its rupture. 73% of passengers on Flight 800 had serious aortic injuries.
In addition, when a body falling from the water hits the water high altitude, rib fractures often occur. This fact was documented by former Civil Aeromedical Institute employees Richard Snyder and Clyde Snow. In 1968, Snyder studied the autopsy results of 169 suicide victims who jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. 85% had broken ribs, 15% had broken spines, and only a third had broken limbs. Fractured ribs in themselves are not dangerous, but with a very strong blow, the ribs can pierce what is underneath them: the heart, lung, aorta. In 76% of the cases studied by Snyder and Snow, the ribs punctured the lung. The statistics for the Flight 800 crash were very similar: most of the fatalities suffered some type of injury related to the force of impact with the surface of the water. All had injuries associated with blunt force trauma to the chest, 99% had broken ribs, 88% had lacerated 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 the three-minute fall from a height? Alive, perhaps. “If by life you mean heartbeat and breathing,” Shanahan says. “Yes, there must have been a lot of them.” Did they understand? Dennis thinks it's unlikely. “I think it's unlikely. Seats and passengers fly in different directions. I think people have completely lost their bearings." Shanahan 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 like it concerned me, but on the other hand, I understood that I was part of the events.”
Knowing how many passengers on Flight 800 fell from the plane in the accident, I wondered if any of them had even a slight chance of survival. If you enter the water like a competitive diver, is it possible to survive a fall from a plane from a great height? This happened at least once. In 1963, Richard Snyder studied cases where people survived falling from great heights. In his work “Survival of People in Free Fall,” he cites a case in which one person fell out of an airplane at an altitude of 10 km and survived, although he only lived for half a day. Moreover, the poor fellow was unlucky - he fell not into the water, but onto the ground (however, when falling from such a height, the difference is already small). Snyder found that the speed of a person's movement upon impact with the ground did not uniquely predict the severity of injury. He spoke with runaway lovers who were more seriously injured by falling down the stairs than a thirty-six-year-old suicide bomber who threw himself onto a concrete surface from a height of more than twenty meters. This man got up and walked, and he didn't need anything more than a Band-Aid and a visit to a therapist.
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 reasonable 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 achieved even after falling from a height of 150 meters, few people could fall from a height of 8,000 meters from an exploding plane, survive and then be interviewed by Dennis Shanaghan.
Was Shanahan right about what happened with Flight 800? Yes. Gradually, all the main parts of the aircraft were found, and his hypothesis was confirmed. The final conclusion was this: sparks from damaged electrical wiring ignited fuel vapors, which resulted in an explosion of one of the fuel tanks.
The grim science of human mutilation began in 1954, when British Comet planes for some unknown reason began crashing 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 deep depth of the wreckage, many parts of the fuselage could not be recovered, so experts had to study “medical evidence,” that is, examine the bodies of twenty-one passengers found on the surface of the water.
The research was carried out at the British Royal Institute of Aviation Medicine 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 titles of all kinds (at least five, not counting the title of nobility, were identified in the article published on the results of the research), I decided that it was he who supervised the work.
Sir Harold and his group immediately noticed the peculiarity of the damage to the bodies. All bodies had fairly few external injuries and at the same time very serious damage to internal organs, especially the lungs. It was known that the kind of lung damage that was found in the passengers of the Comet could be caused by three reasons: a bomb explosion, sudden decompression (which occurs when the pressurization of the aircraft cabin is broken), and also a fall from a very high altitude. In a disaster such as this, all three factors could play a role. Up to this point, the dead have not helped much in solving the mystery of the plane crash.
The first version that began to be considered was associated with a bomb explosion. But not a single body was burned, not a single body was found to contain fragments of objects that could fly apart in the explosion, and not a single body, as Dennis Shanahan would have noticed, was torn to pieces. So the idea of a crazed, hateful ex-airline employee familiar with the effects of explosives was quickly discarded.
Then a group of researchers examined the possibility of a sudden depressurization of the cabin. Could this have caused such severe lung damage? To answer this question, experts used guinea pigs and tested their response 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 surprised by what was happening, but showed no signs of respiratory failure." Other experimental data, both animal and human, similarly showed only a small negative effect of pressure changes, which in no way reflected the condition of the lungs of the Comet's passengers.
As a result, only latest version- “an extremely strong impact on the water,” and the cause of the disaster was the collapse of the hull at a high altitude, possibly due to some kind of structural defect. 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 determine exactly what happens to the lungs when a body hits the water at top speed. When I first saw the mention of animals in the text, I imagined Sir Harold heading to the Cliffs of Dover with a cage of rodents and throwing the innocent animals into the water, where his comrades were waiting in a boat with nets set out. However, Sir Harold did something more meaningful: he and his assistants created a “vertical catapult” that allowed them to achieve the required speed over a much shorter distance. “The 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 first from a height of about 80 cm and fell into the water.” I can well imagine what kind of boy Sir Harold was as a child.
In short, the lungs of the ejected guinea pigs were very similar to the lungs of the Comet passengers. The researchers concluded that the planes broke apart at high altitudes, causing most of the passengers to fall out and into the sea. To understand where the fuselage cracked, the researchers looked at whether the passengers lifted from the surface of the water were dressed or undressed. According to Sir Harold's theory, a person hitting the water while 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 plane's collapse line along the border passing between naked and clothed passengers. In the cases of both planes, people whose seats were in the rear of the plane would have been found clothed, while passengers located closer to the cockpit would have been found naked or with most of their clothing missing.
To prove this theory, Sir Harold lacked one thing: there was no evidence that a person loses his 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 wool suits and dresses in 1950s fashion, took part in the next round of trials at Farnborough, unfortunately, guinea pigs were not used in this part of the research. Several fully clothed mannequins were dropped into the sea from an RAF aircraft. As Sir Harold expected, they lost their clothes when they hit the water, a fact that was confirmed by investigator Gary Erickson, who performed autopsies on the suicide bombers who jumped into the water from the Golden Gate Bridge. As he told me, even in a fall of only 75 m, “shoes usually fly off, pants get ripped at the gusset, back pockets come off.”
*You may be wondering, as I was, whether human corpses have ever been used to reproduce the results of people falling from great heights. The manuscripts that brought me closest to this topic were the manuscripts of two articles: J. C. Earley’s “Body Terminal Velocity,” dated 1964, and J. S. Cotner’s “Analysis of the Effect of Air Resistance on the Fall Velocity 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. C. Earley had used dummies in the study, he would have put the word dummies in the title of the article, so I suspect that several of the bodies donated for scientific purposes actually took the dive with height. — Note. auto
Ultimately, a significant portion of the Comet fragments were 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 can talk calmly at the table. When the waiter comes to refill our water, I fall silent, as if we are talking about something secret or very personal. Shanaghan doesn't seem to care. The waiter spends an endless amount of time peppering my salad, and at this time Dennis says that “... they used a specialized trawler to extract 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 occur 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 “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 of your survival. Federal law requires aircraft manufacturers to provide the ability to evacuate all passengers through half of an aircraft's emergency exits within 90 seconds. Unfortunately, in a real situation, evacuation rarely occurs as planned. “When you look at disasters where people can be saved, it's rare that even half the emergency exits are open,” Shanaghan says. “Plus there is chaos and panic on the plane.” Shanahan gives the example of the Delta plane crash in Dallas. “In this accident, it was entirely possible to save all the people. People suffered very few injuries. But many died in the fire. They crowded around the emergency exits, but could not open them.” Fire is the number one killer in plane crashes. It doesn't take a strong impact for the fuel tank to explode and engulf the entire plane in flames. Passengers die from suffocation as the air becomes scalding hot and fills with toxic smoke emanating from the burning plane's skin. People also die because they break their legs, crashing into the chair in front of them, and cannot crawl to the exit. Passengers cannot follow the evacuation plan in the required order: they run in panic, push and trample each other*.
* Here lies the secret to surviving such disasters: you need to be a man. As shown by an analysis of the events of three plane crashes using an emergency evacuation system, carried out in 1970 by the Institute of Civil Aeromedicine, the most important factor, contributing to a person's survival is his gender (this is the second most important factor, which follows the proximity of the passenger seat to the emergency exit). Adult males have a significantly higher chance of survival. Why? Probably because they have the ability to sweep everyone else out of the way. — Note. auto
Can manufacturers make their planes less of a fire hazard? Of course they can. They could design more emergency exits, but they don't want to because it would reduce cabin seating and reduce revenue. They may install water sprinklers or impact-resistant systems to protect fuel tanks, as in military helicopters. But they don’t want to do this either, because it will make the plane heavier, and more weight means more fuel consumption.
Who makes the decision to sacrifice human lives but save money? Allegedly the Federal Aviation Agency. The problem is that most aircraft safety improvements are evaluated on a cost-benefit basis. To quantify the “benefit,” each life saved is expressed in dollar terms. As the US Urban Institute calculated in 1991, each person is worth $2.7 million. “It's a financial expression of a person's death and its impact on society,” FAA spokesman Van Goudie told me. Although this figure is significantly higher than the cost of raw materials, the numbers in the "benefit" column rarely rise to such levels as to exceed the cost of producing aircraft. To explain his point, Goody used the example of three-point seat belts (which, like in a car, go over both the waist and 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 this security system, we need six hundred sixty-nine million dollars.” So much for shoulder seat belts.
Why doesn't the FAA say, “Expensive pleasure. But will you still start releasing 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 implement new rules, it should provide industry with a cost-benefit analysis and wait for a response,” Shanahan says. — If industrialists don’t like the situation, they go to their congressman. If you represent Boeing, you have enormous influence in Congress."*
*This is the reason why modern airplanes do not have airbags. Believe it or not, an airbag system for airplanes (called an airstop restraint system) was designed; it consists of three parts that protect 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 survived perfectly. The designers used stories from combat aircraft pilots during World War II, who managed to inflate their aircraft just before the crash. life jackets. — Note. auto Since 2001, shoulder seat belts and airbags have been installed on airplanes to improve passenger safety. As of the end of 2010, 60 airlines worldwide have airbags installed on their aircraft, and this figure is constantly growing. — Note. lane
In the FAA's defense, the agency recently approved the implementation new system, which pumps nitrogen-enriched air into fuel tanks, which reduces the oxygen content in the fuel and, consequently, the likelihood of an explosion, which led, for example, to the TWA 800 crash.
I ask Dennis to give some advice to those passengers who, after reading this book, every time they board a plane, they will think about whether they will end up trampled by other passengers at the emergency exit door. He says that best advice- adhere to common sense. Sit closer to the emergency exit. In case of fire, bend down as low as possible to escape hot air and smoke. Hold your breath as long as possible to avoid burning your lungs or inhaling toxic gases. Shanahan himself prefers window seats because aisle passengers are more likely to get hit in the head by bags falling from the overhead storage compartment, which can open with even the slightest jostling.
While we wait for the waiter with the bill, I ask Shanahan the question he's been asked at every cocktail party for the last twenty years: Are the passengers in the front or the back more likely to survive a plane crash? “It depends,” he answers patiently, “what type of accident we’re talking about.” I'll rephrase the question. If he has the opportunity to choose his seat on the plane, where does he sit?
“First class,” he replies.
(Collected from various Internet sites)
Alexander Andryukhin
If what happens in the cockpit during a disaster 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 were involved in serious flight accidents...
The story of Larisa Savitskaya is included in the Guinness Book of Records. In 1981, at an altitude of 5220 meters, the An-24 plane in which she was flying collided with a military bomber. 37 people died in that disaster. Only Larisa managed to survive.
I was 20 years old then,” says Larisa Savitskaya. - Volodya, my husband, and I were flying from Komsomolsk-on-Amur to Blagoveshchensk. We were returning from our honeymoon. First we sat in the front seats. But I didn’t like the front, so we moved to the middle. After takeoff, I immediately fell asleep. And I woke up from noise and screams. My face burned with cold. Then they told me that our plane’s wings were cut off and the roof was 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 was gushing down his face. I somehow immediately realized that he was dead. And she prepared to die too. Then the plane fell apart and I lost consciousness. When I came to my senses, I was surprised that I was still alive. I felt like I was lying on something hard. It turned out to be in the aisle between the chairs. And next to it is a 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 I remembered was an episode from an Italian film, where a girl, after a plane crash, soared in the sky among the clouds, and then, falling into the jungle, remained alive. I didn't expect to survive. I just wanted to die without suffering. I noticed the rungs 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 was near the rift), sat down in the chair, grabbed the armrests and rested her feet on the floor. All this was done automatically. Then I look - the ground. 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 there was a loss of memory. 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 chairs lay a dead man and woman...
Later it was established that the piece of the plane, four meters long and three meters wide, on which Savitskaya fell, glided 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 the spine. You can’t go with such injuries. But Larisa refused the stretcher and walked to 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 flies calmly 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 flight attendants of the Il-86 plane, which in 2002, barely taking off, crashed 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 flashes 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 seats. Tanya is opposite me. The flight was technical - we just needed to return to Pulkovo. At some point the plane began to shake. This happens with 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 have time to get scared. Consciousness instantly floated away somewhere, and I fell into a black void. I woke up from a sharp jolt. At first I didn’t understand anything. Then I gradually figured it out. It turned out that I was lying on a warm engine, littered with chairs. I couldn't unfasten myself. She started screaming, pounding on the metal and disturbing Tanya, who then raised her head and then lost consciousness again. The firefighters pulled us out and took us to different hospitals.
Arina still works as a flight attendant. The plane crash, she said, did not leave any trauma in her soul. However, what happened had a very strong impact on Tatyana Moiseeva. Since then, she no longer flies, although she has not left aviation. She still works in the flight attendant squad, but now as a dispatcher. She doesn’t even tell her close friends about what she experienced.
The Lyceum group is known throughout the country. But few people know that two singers from this group - Anna Pletneva and Anastasia Makarevich - also survived the fall on the plane.
This happened about five years ago,” Anna Pletneva tells Izvestia. “I was always terrified of flying by plane, but now I became brave.” I flew with Nastya Makarevich to Spain. We had a great time. In a cheerful mood we returned to Moscow on a Boeing 767. The neighbors were with the child. The minute we started descending and the flight attendants told us to fasten our seat belts, the child was in my arms. And then the plane went down sharply. Things fell on their heads, the flight attendants shouted: “Hold the children! Bend down!” I realized that we were falling and hugged the baby to me. A thought flashed through my head: “Is this really all?” I used to think that when it’s so scary, my heart should be pounding. But in reality you don’t 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 like they show in the movies. Deathly silence. Everyone, as if in a dream, buckled up and froze. Some prayed, some said goodbye to their relatives.
Anna doesn't remember how much time has passed. Maybe seconds... Or minutes.
“Suddenly the plane gradually began to level out,” she recalls, “I looked around: was it really just me? But no, others also perked up... Even when we stopped on the runway, I couldn’t 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’s surprising is that I’m no longer afraid of flying on airplanes,” she says. - And on charter flights pilots often let us into the cockpit and let us taxi. I like it so much that I want to buy my own small plane in the near future. We will fly it on tour.
Izvestia journalist Georgy Stepanov also survived the fall.
This happened in the summer of 1984, he recalls. - I flew on a Yak-40 plane from Batumi to Tbilisi. When I entered the plane, I felt like I was in a gypsy camp - there were so many things there. They filled all the compartments on top, as well as the passage of the cabin. Don't overcrowd. There were, of course, also more passengers than expected. We took off and gained altitude. Below is the sea. I felt drowsy. But then it was as if someone had hit the fuselage with a sledgehammer, the noise of the turbine became different, and the plane went down sharply, almost vertically. Everyone who was not wearing a seat belt flew off their seats and rolled around the cabin, interspersed with their things. Screams, squeals. A terrible panic began. I was wearing a seat belt. I still remember my state - horror. Everything in me broke down, my body seemed numb. I had the feeling that everything was happening not to me, but that I was somewhere on the side. The only thing I thought was: poor parents, what will happen to them? I could neither scream nor move. Everyone nearby 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: the passengers began to come to their senses and pick up their things. Then, when we were approaching Tbilisi, the pilot came 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 turned out to be a pity; he felt embarrassed for him.
This fall still haunts me to this day. When I board a plane, I feel like a completely helpless creature in an insecure shell.
The world knows more than a dozen cases of happy salvation
No matter how much experts, citing 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. According to research by the Interstate Aviation Committee, the consciousness of a person in a falling plane is switched off. In most cases - in the very first seconds of the fall. At the moment of the collision with the ground, there is not a single person in the cabin who would be conscious. As they say, the body’s defense reaction is triggered.
The ancient Greek poet Theognis wrote: “What is not destined by fate will not happen, but what is destined, I am not afraid of.” There are also cases 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 AN-24 crash at Varandey airport:
24 people survived the disaster, another 28 died.
Many of those rescued are still in shock and refuse to talk. But according to the words of three survivors - Sergei Trefilov, Dmitry Dorokhov and Alexei Abramov - KP correspondents reconstructed what happened in the cabin of the falling plane.
According to official reports, the An-24, tail number 46489, disappeared from radar screens at 13.43 during landing approach.
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 landing in Usinsk in exactly the same way. Immediately the flight attendant walked through the cabin and sat down on a folding chair in the back. Everything was as usual - this is the 10th time I’ve been flying on this watch.
Dmitriy:
- The plane began to shake violently. But there was no panic. Around me people were talking in low voices. We talked about football, about the shift. A neighbor said he felt sick when he landed. But there were no words about the plane crashing.
13.44 - 13.55
Sergey:
- We were flying low. Very. We saw that there was no runway- only snow. A man behind me asked: “Where are we going to sit? In field?"
13.56
Sergey:
- The plane fell on its left side somehow too much. And then there was a sound outside the window - an iron sound, as if something was being torn off. People started looking at each other.
Dmitry Dorokhov escaped with a slight fright: “The leg will heal! The main thing is that he’s alive.”
Dmitriy:
“We were waiting for the pilots to announce now that everything is fine. But there was silence in the cabin. And then the plane went down steeply. Someone shouted: “That’s it, f...! We're falling!"
Alexei:
“I was shocked that only one screamed in the cabin.” The rest silently squeezed into their chairs or began to hide their heads between their knees.
Sergey:
- They didn’t say anything over the speakerphone. Only some strange sound, as if the pilots turned on the microphone, but then turned it off. The flight attendant was also silent - she did not try to calm the people down.
13.57
Sergey:
- I saw through the window how the plane touched the ground with its wing. I couldn’t close my eyes, I just stared. After this, the pilots clearly tried to level the plane, and we jumped up a little. And crashed into the snow!
Alexei:
- They fell silently. Very fast. Everyone sat in stunned silence. Now many newspapers are saying that the pilots were blinded by a flash of sunlight reflected from the icy strip. That's bullshit! There were no outbreaks. Just a blow.
I didn't lose consciousness. It was only dark in my eyes for about two seconds. Well, you know, like after being hit in the jaw. For about five seconds there was complete silence in the cabin. And then everyone moved at once and groaned.
13.58 - 14.00
Alexey Abramov saved four people from a burning plane. His godmother says: “He is a real hero!”
Sergey:
- The plane lay on its side, and there was a hole in the wall. In the salon, someone kept wailing: “It hurts! Hurt!" I scrambled out and crawled along the aisle.
Dmitriy:
“The worst thing was that all the people were sick with the plague—they couldn’t come to their senses. They just didn't understand what happened. I shake my neighbor: “Are you alive?” And he hums. And then the gas tank caught fire. There was no explosion. The flames gradually crawled through the cabin.
Sergey:
- People sitting closer to the nose began to light up and scream. Clothes caught fire in an instant. And these “living torches” jumped up and ran to the rear. On us.
Someone shouted: “Take the things, put them out!” We started grabbing sheepskin coats and jackets from the luggage racks and throwing them on people. They fiddled around for about three minutes and put it out. But I was shocked: even when people were burning, they did not panic. They screamed in pain, not in fear...
14.01 - 14.08
Sergey:
“Then someone commanded: “We’re climbing out!” Now everything here is going to fucking explode...” Me and someone else got out through a hole in the fuselage.
Dmitriy:
- The flight attendant saved us all. She kicked out the emergency hatch and led people out through it.
Alexei:
- I was one of the first near the hatch. He helped four people get out, it was clear that they couldn’t do it themselves - their arms and legs were broken. I shout at them: “Crawl!” - and I pull. They pulled me out. Then he jumped out himself.
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 salon was dragged away. And they shouted all the time: “Come on! Let's!"
Dmitriy:
- The Ural was immediately brought up. They loaded those who could not get up on their own and took them to the village. And we sat down in the snow and looked around like newborn babies.
Alexei:
- Nobody remembered about things then - jackets, bags, mobile phones. I didn’t even feel cold, although I was only wearing a sweater. And only in the hospital, when the first shock passed, I saw that many had tears rolling down their faces...
And here’s how it happens on earth (from reports on the TU-154 crash Anapa - St. Petersburg):
Eyewitness testimony
Residents of the Donetsk region who saw the Tu-154 fall tell stories
The Pulkovo Airlines plane took off from Anapa yesterday afternoon.
There were almost fifty children on board among the 160 passengers, because Anapa is a popular children's resort.
At approximately 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 reached residents of the village of Novgorodskoye, not far from the place where the plane crashed.
“It circled around the ground for a long time, and just before landing it caught fire,” Galina STEPANOVA, a resident of the village of Novgorodskoye, Donetsk region, near which this tragedy happened, told us. - Behind our village there are fields of the Stepnoy state farm. It was on them that the plane crashed. It turned 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 watch. They say everything there was charred. Well, it was so hot for a month and a half, everyone was waiting for rain. We waited. There was such a downpour and a thunderstorm - it was breathtaking. Most likely, the disaster happened because of the thunderstorm.
“Just before the crash, a strong thunderstorm began,” says eyewitness Gennady KURSOV from the village of Stepnoye, near which the plane crashed. - The sky was overcast. Suddenly there was the sound of a low-flying airliner. But until the last moment he was not visible! We and the residents of other surrounding villages noticed it only when there were 150 meters left to the ground. I thought that it would collapse right on us. It was spinning around its axis like a helicopter...
In an Aeroport
Information about flight 612 disappeared from the display as soon as contact with the plane was lost
The flight from Anapa was supposed to land at Pulkovo at 17.45. But at about 16.00 the line “Anapa - St. Petersburg” suddenly went out on the scoreboard. Few people paid attention to this - the greeters had not yet arrived at the airport.
And this was the very moment when the dispatchers and the crew lost contact forever...
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 premises...
- Why a cinema hall? - Those who greeted me became worried and, not yet 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. People stood silently in front of these sheets of paper for several minutes. They didn't believe it.
And only when almost all the bars of the Pulkovo airport started working on TVs with terrifying news at once, the first heartbreaking scream 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 I wrote a will for the apartment...
and for a car - so that it would be easier for my friends who are loan guarantors to pay for me in case something irreparable happens...
how they laughed at me and how they didn’t call my action
laughed - until yesterday, when dozens of families went into eternity
now almost everyone has called back and my action 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 storage tank of the Anapa port
sat and watched the runway, planes, takeoffs and landings...
and now they are no longer there, and the world lives on as before, but without them...
how painful it is to realize that death does not change the world as a whole, but only breaks the destinies of individual people.
I already wrote this somewhere here on the threads, but these thoughts don’t go away, they go around in circles all the time and don’t give me peace.
and the mother has been crying for the 2nd day - she says that she has a feeling that WE have “slipped through”
past death, although we are separated from the catastrophe by 9 days...
I will repeat again and again:
May the passengers rest in peace
eternal clear sky for the crew
let the lost children become angels.
