How do passengers feel? A Russian scientist explained what a person feels during a plane crash. Airplane crash statistics

Statistics stubbornly show that aviation is much higher in terms of safety than motor transport. In the United States, more people die each year in car accidents than have died in plane crashes in the history of air travel.

But even those who suffer disaster in the air still have a chance. Even if it's a one in a million chance. Here are seven stories of those who pulled out their lucky ticket while on the verge of death.

Cecilia Sichan

On August 16, 1989, a regular flight, a McDonnell Douglas DC-9-82 of Northwest Airlines, began taking off from Detroit Airport. There were 154 people on board, including a 4-year-old girl, Cecilia Sichan. Her parents and six-year-old brother were flying with her.

The airliner began to sway already on takeoff; its left wing touched the lighting mast, part of the wing came off and caught fire. The plane then pitched to the right and the other wing crashed through the roof of a car rental office. The plane crashed onto the highway, broke into pieces, and caught fire. Debris and victims' bodies were scattered over an area of ​​more than half a mile.

Worked at the crash site firefighter John Tied I heard a thin squeak and saw a child’s hand among the rubble. A 4-year-old girl, who suffered a fractured skull, a broken leg and collarbone and third-degree burns, was the only one who managed to survive the disaster. She underwent four skin graft surgeries but managed to make a full recovery.

Cecilia was raised by her aunt and uncle. When the girl grew up, she got a tattoo on her wrist in the shape of an airplane, in memory of that tragic and happy day.

Cecilia admits that she is not at all afraid of flying on airplanes, guided by a principle that is well known in Russia - if it has already happened to her once, the likelihood of it happening again is negligible. Simply put, a shell does not hit the same crater twice.

Larisa Savitskaya

On August 24, 1981, 20-year-old student Larisa Savitskaya was returning from a honeymoon with her husband Vladimir. The An-24 plane was flying from Komsomolsk-on-Amur to Blagoveshchensk. Over the city of Zavitinsk at an altitude of 5200 meters, the An-24 collided with a Tu-16 bomber. As a result of the collision, the crews of both aircraft were killed. The An-24 broke into several parts and began to fall. Larisa, who was sleeping in her seat at the rear of the plane, woke up from a strong blow and a sudden burn caused by depressurization of the cabin at altitude.

Another break in the fuselage threw her into the aisle, but Larisa managed to climb back into the chair. As she later recalled, she remembered the Italian film “Miracles Still Happen,” where the heroine saved herself in a similar situation by squeezing into a chair. Larisa herself admitted that she did not believe in salvation, but simply wanted to “die without pain.”

The surviving part of the plane's body fell onto a birch grove, which softened the blow. Experts subsequently established that Larisa Savitskaya fell for 8 minutes from a height of 5200 meters on a piece of aircraft measuring 3 meters wide and 4 meters long.

The blow caused her to lose consciousness for several hours, but then she came to her senses and was able to move independently.

The girl spent two days in the forest alone, among corpses and debris, managing to build herself even a semblance of shelter from the weather.

Rescuers who reached the crash site were shocked to see the girl. Larisa Savitskaya was the only one of the 38 people who was lucky enough to survive this plane crash.

The search engines were so sure of her death that a grave had already been prepared for the woman, as well as for other victims. Doctors determined she had a concussion, spinal injuries in five places, and broken arms and ribs. She also lost almost all her teeth.

Larisa Savitskaya is twice included in the Guinness Book of Records: as a person who survived a fall from a maximum height, and as a person who received the minimum amount of compensation for physical damage in a plane crash - 75 rubles (in 1981 money).

Vesna Vulovich

On January 26, 1972, a Yugoslav Douglas DC-9 passenger plane on a flight from Copenhagen to Zagreb exploded in the air near the village of Serbska Kamenice in Czechoslovakia at an altitude of 10,160 meters. The cause of the tragedy, according to the Yugoslav authorities, was a bomb hidden on board the airliner by Croatian Ustasha terrorists.

The plane, breaking into pieces, began to fall down. In the middle section was 22-year-old flight attendant Vesna Vulovic. Vesna should not have been on that flight - she was replacing her colleague and namesake, Vesna Nikolic.

The plane's debris fell on snow-covered trees, which softened the blow. But luck for the girl was not only this - she was first discovered in an unconscious state by a local peasant, Bruno Honke, who worked in a German field hospital during the war and knew how to provide first aid.

Immediately after this, the flight attendant, the only survivor of the crash, was taken to the hospital. Vesna Vulović spent 27 days in a coma and 16 months in a hospital bed, but still survived. In 1985, she was included in the Guinness Book of Records for the highest jump without a parachute, receiving a certificate from the hands of her musical idol, member of the famous Beatles group Paul McCartney.

Erica Delgado

On January 11, 1995, a McDonnell Douglas DC-9-14 was flying from Bogota to Cartagena with 47 passengers and 5 crew members on board.

Due to an altimeter failure during landing, the plane literally crashed in a swampy area. 9-year-old Erica Delgado, who was flying with her parents and younger brother, was thrown out of the plane at the moment when it began to fall apart. The girl later said that her mother pushed her out of the plane.

The plane exploded and caught fire. Erica fell into a pile of seaweed, which softened the blow, but could not get out. According to her recollections, looting immediately began at the scene of the disaster: while she was alive, one of the local residents tore off a gold necklace and disappeared, ignoring requests for help. After some time, the girl was found by her screams and pulled out of the swamp by a local farmer. Erica Delgado, the only survivor of the disaster, escaped with only a broken arm.

Julianna Dealer Kepke

On December 24, 1971, a Peruvian LANSA Lockheed L-188 Electra was struck by lightning and subjected to severe turbulence. The plane began to disintegrate in the air at an altitude of 3.2 kilometers and fell deep into the tropical forest, about 500 kilometers from the country's capital, Lima.

17-year-old schoolgirl Julianna Koepke was strapped into one of the seats in the row, which broke off from the rest of the frame. The girl fell amid the raging elements, while the fragment rotated like a helicopter blade. This, as well as the fall into the dense crowns of trees, softened the blow.

After the fall, Julianne's collarbone was broken, her arm was badly scratched, her right eye was swollen shut from the impact, and her entire body was covered in bruises and scratches. Nevertheless, the girl did not lose her ability to move. It also helped that Julianne's father was a biologist and taught her the rules of survival in the forest. The girl was able to get food for herself, then found a stream and went down its course. After 9 days, she went out to the fishermen, who saved Julianne.

Based on the real story of Julianne Kepke, several feature films were made, including “Miracles Still Happen” - the one that ten years later will help Larisa Savitskaya survive a plane crash.

Bahia Bakari

On June 30, 2009, an Airbus A-310-300 aircraft of a Yemeni airline was flying flight 626 from Paris to the Comoros Islands with a transfer in the Yemeni capital Sanaa.

Among the passengers was 13-year-old Bahia Bakari, who was flying with her mother from France to the Comoros Islands to visit her grandparents. The plane crashed into the Indian Ocean in Comoros territorial waters just minutes before landing. The girl does not remember what exactly happened, since she was sleeping at the time of the disaster. Bahia herself believes that she was thrown out of the porthole.

In the fall, she received multiple bruises and broke her collarbone. However, a new test awaited her - she had to survive in the water until rescuers arrived. The girl managed to climb onto one of the wreckage of the plane that remained afloat. She spent nine hours on it, as Bakari herself claims, although some sources claim that rescuers found her only 14 hours after the disaster.

The surviving passenger was found by fishermen, who took her to the hospital. Not everyone believed in the possibility of such a rescue - there were rumors that the girl was thrown out of a boat by illegal immigrants, fortunately Bahia has a suitable appearance.

The girl was taken by special plane to Paris, where the then President of France visited her in the hospital. Nicolas Sarkozy.

Bahia Bakari was the only survivor of the 153 people on board the plane. Six months after the disaster, Bakari published her autobiography, Survivor.

"Lucky Four"

On August 12, 1985, the world's largest aviation disaster involving a single aircraft occurred in Japan.

The Boeing 747SR airliner of Japan Airlines took off from Tokyo to Osaka. There were 524 passengers and crew members on board. 12 minutes after takeoff, while climbing to an altitude of 7,500 meters, the plane’s vertical tail stabilizer came off, resulting in depressurization, a drop in cabin pressure and all the airliner’s hydraulic systems failing.

The plane became uncontrollable and was virtually doomed. Nevertheless, the pilots, with incredible efforts, managed to keep the plane in the air for another 32 minutes. As a result, he crashed near Mount Takamagahara, 100 kilometers from Tokyo.

The airliner crashed in a mountainous area, and rescuers were able to reach it only the next morning. They did not expect to meet survivors.

However, the search team found four people alive at once - a 24-year-old flight attendant Yumi Ochiai, 34 year old Hiroko Yoshizaki with my 8 year old daughter Mikiko and 12 year old Keiko Kawakami.

Rescuers found the first three on the ground, and 12-year-old Keiko was found sitting in a tree. It was there that the girl was thrown out at the time of the death of the liner.

The four survivors were nicknamed the "Lucky Four" in Japan. During the flight, all of them were in the tail compartment, in the area where the plane's skin ruptured.

Much more people could have survived this terrible catastrophe. Keiko Kawakami later said that she heard the voice of her father and other wounded people. As doctors later established, many of the Boeing passengers died on the ground from wounds, cold and painful shock, since rescue teams did not try to reach the crash site at night. As a result, 520 people became victims of the crash.

Fall from a great height (in a plane crash)

I don't believe it's a coincidence. Nothing happens by chance. The events that they deserve happen to people. People die when they are supposed to die. If, for some reason, it is too early for a person to die, he will not die, even if death seemed inevitable.

There are two women who survived plane crashes and falls from great heights (10,160 and 5,200 meters).

They shouldn't have survived. The fact is that when an airplane crashes in the air, a person finds himself in an extremely unfavorable environment.

Low temperatures (about -60) combined with strong winds (several hundred km/h) lead to rapid freezing of the skin, eyes and other exposed areas of the body. A sharp drop in pressure is also dangerous: overboard its level is two and a half times lower than in the cabin. Therefore, when air rushes in at great speed through a crack in the hull, a person may experience a condition that is well known to scuba divers. This is decompression sickness. The result is tragic: gases dissolved in the blood and tissues begin to form bubbles that destroy the walls of cells and blood vessels.

Stewardess Vesna Vulovich

The 22-year-old flight attendant should not have been on this flight. but due to an error by the airline, it was assigned to him instead of another flight attendant with the same name (Vesna Nikolic). On the day of the disaster, Vesna had not yet completed her training and was on the crew as a trainee.

The plane crashed at an altitude of about 10,160 meters (bomb explosion).

Vesna Vulovich was working in the passenger compartment when the explosion occurred. She immediately lost consciousness, and subsequently could not remember what she was doing and where exactly she was (in the middle part of the fuselage or in the tail).

Local residents arrived at the crash site before the rescuers. They disassembled the fragments and tried to find survivors. Peasant Bruno Honke discovered Vesna, gave her first aid and handed her over to the arriving doctors. Vesna was in a coma and received many injuries: fractures of the base of the skull, three vertebrae, both legs and the pelvis.

According to Vesna Vulovich herself, the first thing she asked for when she returned to consciousness was to smoke.

The treatment took 16 months, of which for 10 months the girl’s lower body was paralyzed (from the waist to the legs).

After the disaster

According to the memoirs of Vesna Vulovich, she did not develop a fear of flying, since she did not remember the moment of the disaster. Therefore, after recovery, the girl tried to return to work as a flight attendant at Yugoslav Airlines, but ended up getting an office position with an airline.

She got married in 1977 (divorced in 1992). Have no children.

In 1985, the name of Vesna Vulović was included in the Guinness Book of Records. (like someone who squeezes out when falling from the greatest height).

For some unknown reason, that day fate did not want to take away any Vesnu Nikolic, nor Vesna Vulovic. One simply didn’t get on the plane due to an error at the airline, and the other, although she got on the plane, still survived.

Usually, the “right” people simply don’t get on the unfortunate plane. They break (an arm or a leg), or lose a ticket, or something else happens that saves their life.

In this case, Vesna Vulovich still got on the ill-fated plane. But it was too early for her to die. Therefore, she was the only survivor.

Death

Vesna Vulović died in December 2016 at home in Belgrade. On December 23, her body was discovered after the police opened the apartment, where the woman’s friends turned, concerned that she had not appeared on the street for several days and did not answer phone calls. The cause of death has not been disclosed by authorities.

Savitskaya, Larisa Vladimirovna

Larisa Vladimirovna Savitskaya, born Andreeva(born January 11, 1961, Blagoveshchensk, Amur Region) - a woman who survived a plane crash and a fall from a height of 5200 meters

On August 24, 1981, the An-24 plane on which the Savitsky spouses were flying collided with a Tu-16 military bomber at an altitude of 5220 m.

There were many empty seats on the plane, and, despite the fact that the Savitskys had tickets for the middle part of the plane, they took seats in the tail.

After the collision, the crews of both aircraft were killed. As a result of the collision, the An-24 lost wings with fuel tanks and the top of the fuselage. The remaining part broke several times during the fall.

At the time of the disaster, Larisa Savitskaya was sleeping in her seat at the rear of the plane. I woke up from a strong blow and a sudden burn (the temperature instantly dropped from 25 °C to −30 °C). After another break in the fuselage, which passed right in front of her seat, Larisa was thrown into the aisle, waking up, she reached the nearest seat, climbed in and pressed herself into it, without having buckled herself in. Larisa herself subsequently claimed that at that moment she remembered an episode from the film “Miracles Still Happen,” where the heroine squeezed into a chair during a plane crash and survived.

Part of the plane's body landed on a birch grove, which softened the blow. According to subsequent studies, the entire fall of the plane fragment measuring 3 meters wide by 4 meters long, where Savitskaya ended up, took 8 minutes. Savitskaya was unconscious for several hours. Waking up on the ground, Larisa saw in front of her a chair with the body of her dead husband. She received a number of serious injuries, but could move independently.

Two days later, she was discovered by rescuers, who were very surprised when, after two days of coming across only the bodies of the dead, they met a living person. Larisa was covered in paint flying off the fuselage, and her hair was very tangled in the wind. While waiting for rescuers, she built herself a temporary shelter from the wreckage of the plane, keeping warm with seat covers and covering herself from mosquitoes with a plastic bag. It rained all these days. When it ended, she waved to rescue planes flying past, but they, not expecting to find survivors, mistook her for a geologist from a nearby camp. Larisa, the bodies of her husband and two other passengers were discovered as the last of all the victims of the disaster.

Doctors determined she had a concussion, spinal injuries in five places, and broken arms and ribs. She also lost almost all her teeth. The consequences affect Savitskaya’s entire subsequent life.

She later learned that a grave had already been dug for both her and her husband. She was the only survivor of 38 people on board.

___________________

Despite numerous injuries, Larisa did not receive a disability: according to Soviet standards, the severity of her individual injuries did not allow her to receive a disability, and it was not possible to receive it collectively. Later, Larisa was paralyzed, but she was able to recover, although she could not do many jobs and was forced to do odd jobs and even went hungry.

In 1986, Larisa gave birth to a son, Gosha, without her husband, and for a long time they lived only on child care benefits.

The unusual fate attracted the attention of the press, and numerous interviews with Savitskaya appeared. She became the heroine of television programs of several television companies.

Larisa Savitskaya was twice included in the Russian edition of the Guinness Book of Records:

• like a person who survived a fall from a maximum height,
• as a person who received the minimum amount of compensation for physical damage - 75 rubles.

____________________

Note!

Both surviving women (Vesna Vulovich and Larisa Savitskaya) were not even wearing seat belts! But this did not prevent them from surviving a fall from a height of 10,160 and 5,200 meters, respectively.

Their lives were especially valuable, so there was, one might say, a direct “Divine intervention” that saved them.

Usually, fate acts more gently and the “right people” simply do not end up on bad planes (and other bad situations).

_____________________

What happens to useless people?

Here's what:

Dear friends, be helpful! Helpful people are usually more resilient and happier.

A storm has begun. Armchair experts on the Internet claim that after a storm it will only be easier for divers to work - the water itself will wash many things ashore. Those professionals who are now examining the sunken TU-154 think differently. Bad weather, on the contrary, will confuse all the cards. The head of the search and rescue unit of the southern regional search and rescue team of the Ministry of Emergency Situations, Vyacheslav Ivashchenko, told Komsomolskaya Pravda about how the search for the crashed plane is going on.

- Under what conditions do you have to work?

Almost ideal. The plane lies on a large underwater field. The depth is approximately the same everywhere - about 25 meters. That is, you can search during the day without special lighting; natural conditions are enough. The bottom is solid sandstone. There is almost no silt or dirt.

- And what can you find?

Large parts of the aircraft, small ones, some personal items. If we manage to find electronic devices - phones, tablets - they are immediately taken upstairs. Then they are sent for examination. Yesterday we lifted an aircraft engine weighing three tons from the bottom. There are also fragments of bodies (according to data, as of 18:40 on December 28, the remains of 16 people were found - Author)

Divers working underwater at the Tu-154 crash site.

- Are there any whole bodies?

Alas. This happens when you hit the water hard. The dead are literally torn apart. I saw something similar during the Armenian Airlines Airbus crash 10 years ago. Also near Adler. The injuries are similar.

(Recall that information appeared in the media that the bodies of the dead were found without clothes. Now it is clear why. By the way, the data that the passengers were wearing life jackets was also not confirmed.)

- How do you look for fragments at the bottom?

An anchor is lowered from a ship to the surface. I tie myself to it with a rope and begin to swim slowly in a circle. Then the rope lengthens, and I swim in a larger circle. The bottom is searched using such divergent trajectories. Small objects are tied with a rope and lifted by partners in the boat on the surface. Large aircraft parts are pulled out using a crane. I indicate the coordinates, a ship or barge with a lift floats on the surface. Then the find is tied with slings and lifted.

- What is more: personal belongings or aircraft parts?

90% - fuselage elements. Passengers' belongings are rarely found.

- They say the storm will help you.

No. The storm will shake everything at the bottom. Something may shift to already tested areas. In addition, now everything is clearly visible under water. And after the storm, the clouds will rise and work will become much more difficult.

- Is it psychologically difficult to swim underwater and find remains?

You need to set yourself up correctly. I focus on the idea that there is difficult but important work to be done. Return their loved ones to the relatives. Only I can do this. There will be no others. This kind of motivation helps.

- Are there any tricks to relax after work and reboot?

I return to my family, play with the children, and just try not to think about what lies at the bottom. Again, I remind myself that I don’t have an ordinary profession where anything can happen.

Vyacheslav Ivashchenko said that the divers of the Ministry of Emergency Situations work hard all day long. They go out to sea in the morning, when it begins to get light, and return to shore only in the evening at sunset. But even so, each submariner manages to work no more than two hours. The rest of the time is spent on diving and ascent, preparing equipment and refilling oxygen cylinders.

PHOTO REPORT

Rescuers from the Ministry of Emergency Situations lift the wreckage of a Tu-154 from the bottom of the Black Sea

HELP "KP"

The search operation involves 45 ships, 15 deep-sea vehicles, 192 divers, 12 aircraft and five helicopters. A self-propelled crane arrived in the area of ​​the plane crash to lift large debris.

About one and a half thousand fragments of the aircraft were discovered. So far, one third has been brought to the surface. Another 12 large pieces of debris were discovered. One of them is two by three meters, the second is about five meters long, the third is more than 60 meters long.

MEANWHILE

The main phase of the search for the wreckage of the crashed Tu-154 has ended

“The active phase of the search operation in the Black Sea has been completed,” the source said. The search group recovered almost all the fragments of the Tu-154 from the bottom of the sea. The group of ships that took part in the operation left the Black Sea

BY THE WAY

Rescuers from the Tu-154 crash site: The dead have the same injuries as the victims of the 2006 disaster

Since the day of the Tu-154 crash, rescuers have been working non-stop at the crash site in the Black Sea. They are raising from the bottom the bodies of the dead and the wreckage of the plane, on board at the time of the crash there were 92 people - crew members, artists of the ensemble named after. Alexandrova, journalists and Dr. Lisa.

Our photojournalist Vladimir Velengurin observes with his own eyes how divers work and how the search operation is progressing

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.

An excellent 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 in a collision 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-disposed 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 after 9 days. 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 was flying with her husband from their honeymoon on a flight from Komsomolsk-on-Amur to 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.

The original was taken from

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. Shanahan 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.

The plane, taking off from John F. Kennedy International Airport on July 17, 1996, to Paris, exploded in mid-air over the Atlantic Ocean near East Morich, New York. 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 became clear that explosives had been planted on the plane long before the crash, as part of a training program for sniffing dogs.) Versions circulated about the involvement of government services 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 decoding 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 plane's 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 there was an explosion 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 the chaos and gore, the result of the worst passenger plane crash in numbers, diagrams, and diagrams. The nightmare has been transformed into something that can be discussed over coffee at a morning meeting of the National Transportation Safety Board. “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 - cut off arms, legs, pieces of the body - are a fairly familiar sight for Shanagan. “In this case, it’s just fabric. You can force your thoughts to flow in the right direction and do your work.” It's blood, but it doesn't 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 a great height hits the water, ribs often break. 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 survival 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 the 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 Royal Air Force Institute of Aviation Medicine in Farnborough under the direction of Captain W. C. Stewart and Sir Harold E. Whittingham, Director of Medical Services of the British national 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 the latest version could be considered as the cause of death of the plane passengers - “an extremely strong impact on the water”, and as the cause of the disaster - 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 lower 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 were unable to 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. A 1970 Civil Aeromedical Institute analysis of three plane crashes involving an emergency evacuation system showed that the most important factor contributing to a person's survival is gender (the second most important factor, followed by the proximity of the passenger's 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 World War II combat aircraft pilots who managed to inflate their life jackets just before the crash. - 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 a new system that pumps nitrogen-enriched air into fuel tanks, reducing the oxygen content of the fuel and therefore the likelihood of an explosion, such as the one that led to the TWA Flight 800 disaster.

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 the best advice is to use 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 are 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.