You are more likely to choke and die eating a nice meal, than you are dying in a plane
crash.
I guess that explains why airline food sucks!
Plane pasta!
To improve your safety!
But a lot of this “flight safety” stuff doesn’t make a lot of sense on the surface.
Like “Bring your seat to an upright position and open the window shades”, or “The captain
has dimmed the cabin lights in preparation for landing”.
These are indeed safety precautions, but I don’t think the light is going to kill me
… or is it?
Sorry we have a new editor!
But seriously, have you ever wondered why child seats are not mandatory on flights,
but they are in cars?
According to the FAA, mandating the use of child seats on flights can actually increase
the fatality rate of infants, but the reason, is Not What You Think!
Lights … off!
It takes a good few seconds before you can actually start to kinda see your surroundings
in sudden darkness.
During an airplane emergency evacuation, those few seconds could make the difference between
becoming a survivor … and becoming statistics, which is why lights are dimmed in advance
of take off and landing, so your eyes have plenty of time to adjust, in case of an evacuation
when it’s dark outside.
Opening the cabin window shades during daylight is for the same reason, to allow your eyes
to adjust to outdoor light so when you get to the exit door to jump out on the slides,
your eyes are already acclimatized.
The biggest cause of airplane crashes is pilot error … and by that I don’t mean the pregnant
flight attendants!
That said, more than 50% of fatal aviation accidents happen during take off and landing,
when the aircraft is “low and slow”.
Not only things like bird strikes naturally happen in lower altitudes, but generally speaking,
the crew has less time to respond to an emergency when close to the ground, and in the case
of the Telluride Regional Airport in Colorado, well, there is also less space!
The runway ends with a 1000-ft drop to San Miguel River below.
That’s why there is an engineered materials arrestor system installed at each end of this
runway, so in case of a run-over, the aircraft can come to a quick stop.
Guess how many fatalities occurred between 2010 and 2020 onboard scheduled commercial
passenger airlines in the United States.
The answer is 2, and that’s 2 too many.
But this goes to show how safe it is to fly on commercial airlines these days.
Of course, this figure excludes fatalities onboard non-scheduled flights, commuter airlines
and the biggest category of them all, general aviation.
Think of general aviation as all "private transport" and recreational aviation, which
took 4,328 lives in that same 11-year timeframe.
Aviation safety has been consistently improving over the past 60 years, and some of those
improvements are directly tied to the research and experiments that the FAA conducted and
continues to do with help from NASA, US Air Force and US Navy, among others.
For example, in April of 1964, the FAA crash-tested a Douglas DC7 transport aircraft to examine
the post-crash causes of fatalities.
The test was designed to break the landing gear, sever the wings and crash the fuselage
into a hill.
A few months later, in September, another crash test was conducted using a Lockheed
L-1649 transport airplane.
The post-crash survivability data that was recorded and analyzed as part of these and
many more tests, is how several aviation regulatory requirements turned into law.
For example, all passengers and crew of an airplane at full seating capacity must be
able to evacuate in 90 seconds or less, and only through half of the exit door.
Otherwise the aviation authorities won't approve the safety certification for airplanes of
that model.
But how did the FAA come up with 90 seconds, and why only through half of the exit doors?
It has to do … with fire!
There are two types of post-crash fires, one which everyone is familiar with and another
that some may not have heard of.
First is the "fireball".
That’s when fuel is released during a crash, creating a flammable mist in the air that
ignites and then continues burning as the aircraft comes to a stop.
The second type is when flashover happens.
As fire continues to burn inside an enclosed space, like a house or the fuselage of an
airplane, smoke starts to accumulate under the ceiling, which in turn radiates down the
heat.
It doesn’t take long at all until each and every combustible surface exposed to this
thermal radiation, like carpets and seat cushions, reach their flashover temperatures, at which
time, they simultaneously ignite.
In case of a plane crash and the subsequent fire, the cabin interior must remain habitable
long enough to evacuate everyone, before flashover happens.
Even with the mandated use of self-extinguishing materials in cabin sidewalls, ceilings, partitions,
and seat cushions, in case of a fire, the cabin could reach flashover temperatures in
2-3 minutes.
This is why the evacuation time was initially capped at 2 minutes, but further research
and analysis led the FAA to drop it down to 90 seconds.
But why only use half of the exit doors during the certification test?
That’s because in case of a substantial fire on one side of the cabin, the exit doors
on that side may not be safe to use.
Today, evacuation tests for new airframes are computer-simulated.
So there should be no surprise that when it comes to post-crash survivability, much of
the FAA’s efforts have been focused on preventing post-crash fires in the first place, and then
on improving evacuation procedures.
In 1984, the FAA and NASA conducted the Controlled Impact Demonstration of a remotely-operated
B-720.
The airplane was fully fueled with an anti-misting kerosene to see if it would prevent the fireball.
The test may have failed, since the airplane was engulfed in flames upon crashing.
But since a number of anthropomorphic dummies were onboard, the experiment did provide data
on the forces that passengers are exposed to in a crash.
This test also clearly shows that it’s never too late to express how you really feel about
someone!
But notice how the seats are all upright!
That’s less for your safety, and more for the safety of those behind you.
A reclined seat could slow down or even prevent someone in the row behind you from evacuating.
Think of someone who is older, or bigger, especially since the leg room has been decreasing
over the past decade or so.
Every second counts in an evacuation, and that’s why you are not supposed to take
your belongings with you, because stopping to grab your stuff from the overhead bins
will take up precious time in case of an emergency evacuation.
Unfortunately, some people still don’t take it seriously!
After incidents in which children were injured by unexpected turbulence, the FAA and aviation
authorities in other countries recommended the use of approved child restraint systems
on flights.
But this was never made mandatory, like it was for automobiles.
The FAA's rationale was that if the use of child seats were to be made mandatory on flights,
parents would have been forced to purchase an additional ticket for a seat for their
child, as opposed to just holding them in their arms.
The additional cost of purchasing a seat for each infant could have become the deciding
factor in the parents’ choice of transportation, by car or by airplane.
Since mandatory child restraint systems would have inadvertently encouraged travel by automobiles,
this could have subsequently increased the fatality rate of children under the age of
2, given the substantially higher fatality rates of driving a vehicle.
The moral of the story is, listen to what flight attendants ask you to do, it’s for
your own safety.
Just sit back, drink your juice, watch a movie and please …
don’t act like a little
biiiiiiiiiiiiiiii*ch!