I watched that recreation of the scenario and the audio of that crash where the pilot had his kids in the cockpit and the older kid accidentally messed with something and the G forces made it so the pilots couldn’t fix the situation before the place lost too much altitude and crashed. Now I understand why people who aren’t seatbelted would die from such a crash, but Im just wondering what kills all the other passengers?
Are their insides crushed to death by impact with the seatbelt? Are their brains instantly nullified by hitting the inside of their skulls to forcibly?
And, is it also the same reason why train derailments are often equally deadly? Because there too… Thomas the tank engine stories make it look like a derailing is just a whoops! Better call Gordon! kinda situation…. But in the news it seems like all the passengers often get killed in those scenarios too…
What’s the deal?
In: 1
Planes fly at 500mph and are carrying 7000 gallons of jet fuel.
If this missile hits something, it’s immediately converted into twisted metal and fire. There usually aren’t whole bodies recovered from plane crashes, just… parts.
That said, each crash is a unique event. Sometimes the pilots are able to guide the plane down into a controlled belly landing that keeps it together and doesn’t immediately obliterate everyone, and sometimes the plane disintegrates in midair due to some catastrophic event at cruising altitude.
Even the strongest materials don’t fare well with sudden velocity changes. At anything but the slowest, shallowest descent rates the amount of energy involved in an airliner crash either tears the cabin apart (and sends bodies strapped to chairs flying) or squishes/flattens the cabin instantly pulping everyone inside. If, for some miracle you/your seat is thrown wide of the cataclysm you’re still travelling several hundred miles per hour – either along the ground or towards it. You would have to be extraordinarily lucky for your seat to land seat-down (and not your face down) as you tumble at 100mph along the ground and not have your limbs pulped or removed or worse, have them broken and they flop batter the rest of you. Face it, without being enclosed by rigid or deformable energy absorbing enclosures, the human body does poorly at excessive speeds (or the sudden decelerations when you hit things).
The most “survived” airliner crashes have been where the pilots have managed to reduce the vertical speed as much as possible and keep the horizontal speed to under maybe 200 mph – in these cases, the plane’s fuselage – or whole sections of it – manage to tumble and roll, but keep their shape, somewhat protecting those inside while they scrape along the ground dissipating energy. One of the ones that pops to mind is the Sioux City Iowa crash, which was rather well controlled given the circumstances. THere have been a few others where the plane has broken apart but mostly just skidded across the runway.
Crashes where the plane runs into terrain at any speed much above stall speed… or from any altitude above maybe 100 ft. just the energies involved in the falling aircraft are enough to give gross blunt trauma to passengers no matter how well they’re strapped in. Remember, empty of fuel and passengers these planes can still be 100s of tons. That’s a lot of plane to collapse on you.
The reason why a race car driver is often able to survive tremendous crash speeds is the race course’s barriers and the car itself is designed to dissipate the immense forces involved in a rather controlled and gradual (comparatively) fashion. If a driver hits the wall at 45 degrees travelling 200 km/h by himself he dies instantly as all of the decelelration forces are directed to his body. If he has 10′ of rubber tires then a breakaway chain fence and his car slowly disintegrates as it absorbs the shocks, there’s much less energy to impart to the driver. There are no energy absorbing design features in an airplane, to add crumple zones and airbags and all that stuff would make the plane prohibitively heavy and thus expensive to build and fly.
And all this of course is before we start talking about the fuel. Throw several thousand gallons of fuel into this and you can see that even IF you survive the physical breakup of the aircraft and you’ve come to a rest on the ground, if you’re anywhere near where the fuel has spilled you now have that to content with. Add in your most likely injuries, if you’re even conscious (the tumble and general knocking about has probably knocked you unconscious), you’re now in a real pickle. And NOW if you crash anywhere at all remote like in the middle of a forest, and maybe in the winter so snow or rain puts out the fires and it takes hours or days for search and rescue to find you, meanwhile you’ve died from your injuries or been eaten by wolves. :/
Like other people have pointed out, every plane crash is different. But lets look at your example of the person who was dutifully seatbelted in when the plane made impact with the ground.
Assuming we have some kind of indestructible plane that doesn’t tear itself to pieces on impact and rather than normal seat belts, we give the passengers a 5 point harness, it comes down to something pretty simple. How quickly their brain stops moving.
If the plane lawn darts into the ground and they go from cruising speed ~500mph to zero in fractions of a second, the brain gets crushed against the skull and it’s instant death. But if we have a two mile long grass field and the pilot is able to pully a Sully and guide the plane to bumpy but other wise safe landing where the plane can decelerate normally, then everyone’s fine.
A common one in car crashes can be where their body looks otherwise OK but the sudden stop of the crash means the force of decelerating (stopping) the heart puts so much strain on the Aorta (Massive artery leaving the heart) that it tears and the victim bleeds to death in seconds
Any number of things. The biggest is the impact itself. Going from several hundred miles per hour to zero miles per hour that quickly produce forces of several hundred Gs. Think about what happens when you throw an egg at a wall as hard as you can, and then imagine that happening to the human body. There’s also blunt force trauma from items in the cabin flying around at high speeds and burns and smoke inhalation from fires.
Latest Answers