Experts say full survival rates in air crashes grow more common
An Aeromexico flight carrying 103 people crashed just after taking off from an airport in northwestern Mexico, forcing passengers to escape via emergency slides before the aircraft went up in flames. No one died. And although that might be surprising to many people, it's in line with recent developments in aviation safety, CNN aviation analyst Mary Schiavo said Wednesday.
"It's actually getting to be more typical, more the rule than the exception," Schiavo said, noting that no one dies in 87% of air crashes, according to the International Civil Aviation Organization. "It's the science of crashworthiness that has really improved over the last 20 years to help people survive a crash," Schiavo said. "Before then, you used to think a plane crash (meant) everyone would die. Not so anymore."
For example, she said, all aboard survived when an Air France jetliner overran a runway in Toronto in 2005, and when a Singapore Airlines plane burst into flames in the city-state in June 2016. Just three passengers died when an Asiana Airlines flight crashed at San Francisco's airport in July 2013.
A bionic priest and a web designer were on the Aeromexico flight.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday August 02 2018, @06:02PM
> It is getting very rare (although not unheard of) for an aircraft at cruising altitude to suddenly fall all the way down to the ground/water.
It is also getting very rare for an aircraft to get the wrong altitude reading, speed reading, or night-time misreading of terrain. Or for an engine failure to cause a loss of control.
That's kind of the point of saying that crashes are more survivable: big errors have more safeties built around them. Progress in materials, design, and luck, help reduce the body count from smaller failures.
Must be a slow news summer.
If airlines weren't so obsessed with not bleeding money, we'd get per-seat Mars-lander-grade airbags and fatalities would drop to near zero.