How do people survive plane crashes? Incredible and fantastic cases of survival in plane crashes (22 photos)
Today we decided to remember the incredible cases, a list of air crashes that occurred with multi-seat aircraft, as a result of which, of all those on board, only one person survived.
On June 14, 1943, a plane carrying American soldiers on leave crashed in Australia. In conditions of poor visibility due to fog, the plane hit the tops of trees and crashed. Only Foy Kenneth Roberts survived.there were 41 soldiers on board ), who suffered severe traumatic brain injury. The doctors managed to save Roberts and he lived until 2004. However, as a result of his injuries, he forgot everything about the accident itself and lost the ability to speak.
Julianne Dealer Kopke survives plane crash after falling 3km
On December 23, 1971, 500 kilometers from the capital of Peru, Lima, as a result of falling into a vast thunderstorm area, a passenger plane actually fell apart in the air at an altitude of more than three kilometers.
“Suddenly there was an amazing silence around me. The plane has disappeared. I must have been unconscious and then I came to. I flew, spinning in the air, and could see the forest rapidly approaching below me.
Seventeen-year-old girl Julianne Dealer Kopke was the only survivor - she was strapped to a row of chairs and fell into the dense jungle. In the fall, she broke her collarbone, injured her arm and suffered a moderate head injury.For 9 days, Juliana wandered through the jungle, trying not to leave the stream, believing that sooner or later it would lead her to civilization. The stream also gave the girl water. Nine days later, Juliana found a canoe and a shelter in which she hid and waited. Soon she was found in this shelter by lumberjacks.
On January 26, 1972, Croatian terrorists blew up a McDonnell Douglas DC-9-32 passenger plane belonging to JAT Yugoslav Airlines over the Czech town of Serbska Kamenice. The board followed from Copenhagen to Zagreb, there were 28 people on board. A bomb planted in the luggage compartment detonated at an altitude of 10,160 m. 27 passengers and crew members died, but 22-year-old flight attendant Vesna Vulovich survived after falling from a height of more than 10 km.
Vesna Vulovich
Vesna Vulovich after a plane crash fell from a height of 10160 m and survived
When falling from a height of 10160 meters (the case is a record for survivors of a fall from a great height ) received severe injuries to the spine and skull, was unconscious when she was discovered. After that, she was in a coma for almost a month, the total duration of treatment was about one and a half years. After recovery, she was transferred to ground work in the airline, in Yugoslavia was considered a folk hero.
Larisa Savitskaya
On August 24, 1981, passenger and military aircraft collided over the territory of the USSR. The only survivor was passenger Larisa Savitskaya, who ended up in the wreckage of the plane, where there were chairs in which she took refuge. When falling from a height of more than five kilometers, Savitskaya received serious spinal injuries, craniocerebral injuries, and lost almost all her teeth. For three days, she waited for rescuers, as the wreckage fell in the taiga. Unlike Vesna, Vulovich did not receive much support from the state: the fact of the disaster was hidden, the injuries she sustained separately did not allow her to apply for disability and receive maintenance from the state, she was paid 75 rubles at a time as a survivor of the plane crash.
Larisa Savitskaya spent three days in the taiga after the plane crash
On January 13, 1995, a plane crashed in Colombia. forced landing in marshy area. The landing was unsuccessful, when it hit the ground, the ship broke into pieces and exploded. Only nine-year-old girl Erica Delgado survived, who was thrown out of the plane by her mother at the moment when it began to fall apart. Erica fell into a pile of seaweed, but could not get out. According to her recollections, one of the locals tore off her gold necklace and disappeared, ignoring requests for help ( the bodies of the dead were also robbed). After some time, the girl was found by her cries for help and pulled out of the swamp by a local farmer.
August 27, 2006 in Kentucky, USA, a passenger plane crashed during takeoff. The crash was caused by the captain erroneously choosing runway, the length of which was too short for aircraft of this type, as a result, only the co-pilot, James Polehinck, survived, who, as a result of numerous injuries ( severe concussion, many fractures, lung pierced by ribs) lost his memory and did not remember anything about the plane crash.
4-year-old Cecilia Sichan survived a plane crash in 1989
On August 16, 1989, a regular flight, a McDonnell Douglas DC-9-82 operated by Northwest Airlines, began to take off from Detroit Airport. There were 157 people on board, including 4-year-old girl Sessilia Sichan. Her parents and six-year-old brother flew with her.
The liner began to sway already on takeoff, it touched the lighting mast with its left wing, part of the wing came off and caught fire. The plane then tilted to the right, and the other wing broke through the roof of the car rental office. The plane crashed onto the highway, falling to pieces, and caught fire. The debris and bodies of the victims were scattered over an area of more than half a mile.
Firefighter John Thied, who was working at the crash site, heard a thin squeak and saw a child's hand among the wreckage. A 4-year-old girl who suffered a fractured skull, fractured leg and collarbone and third-degree burns was the only one who managed to survive the crash. She underwent four skin grafts 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 form of an airplane, in memory of that day.
Baya Bakari
On June 30, 2009, a Yemeni airline plane crashed off the coast of the Comoros, falling directly into the ocean. Of the 153 passengers, only thirteen-year-old Baia Bakari, a Frenchwoman, who flew to the Comoros from Marseille with her mother, survived. When the girl was thrown out of the plane when it hit the water, she received multiple bruises and broke her collarbone. She managed to get out of the water onto one of the wrecks of the plane, on which she was for 14 hours, until she was discovered by the crew of a passing ship, who delivered the girl, suffering primarily from hypothermia, to the hospital.
In January 2010, Bakari published her autobiography, Survivor, with journalist Omar Guendouz.. In May of the same year, the newspaperAOL Newspublished information that Steven Spielberg Bakary offered to buy the film rights to her book, but she refused.
Despite the fact that thousands of times more people die in car accidents every year than in plane crashes, the fear of flying lives in the mass consciousness. First of all, this is due to the scale of the tragedies - a crashed liner means tens and hundreds of simultaneous deaths. This is much more shocking than several thousand reports of fatal accidents stretched over a month.
The second reason for the fear of a plane crash is the realization of one's own helplessness and inability to somehow influence the course of events. Almost always this is true. However, the history of aeronautics has accumulated a small number of exceptions in which people survived by falling with the aircraft (or its wreckage) from a height of several kilometers without a parachute. These cases are so few that many of them have their own Wikipedia pages.
Wreckage Rider
Vesna Vulovic, a flight attendant for Jugoslovenski Aerotransport (today Air Serbia), holds the world record for surviving free fall without a parachute. She got into the Guinness Book of Records because she survived after 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 the moment of the disaster or its details. Because of this, the flight attendant did not have a fear of flying - she perceived all the circumstances from hearsay. It turned out that at the time of the destruction of the plane, Vulovich was squeezed between the seat, the body of another crew member and the trolley from the buffet. 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 the pelvis. For 10 months, the girl was paralyzed Bottom part body, in general, the treatment took almost 1.5 years.
After recovering, Vulovich tried to return to her previous job, but she was not allowed to fly and was given a position in the airline's office.
Target selection
Surviving as Vesna Vulovich in a cocoon of debris is much easier than in a single free flight. However, in the second case there are surprising examples. One of them dates from 1943, when US military pilot Alan Magee flew over France in a B-17 heavy four-engine bomber. At an altitude of 6 km, he was thrown out of the plane, and the glass roof of the station slowed down the fall. As a result, Maggie fell to the stone floor, remained alive and was immediately taken prisoner by the shocked Germans.
A great fall target would be a large haystack. Several cases are known when people survived in plane crashes if densely growing bushes appeared on their way. A dense forest also gives some chances, but here 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 gained in flight to the center of the earth, with good luck, can make injuries compatible with life.
There is almost no chance of survival when falling on the water surface. Water practically does not compress, so the result of contact with it will be the same as in a collision with concrete.
Salvation can sometimes bring the most unexpected objects. One of the main things skydiving enthusiasts are taught is to stay away from power lines. However, a case is known when it was a high-voltage line that saved the life of a skydiver who found himself in free flight due to an unopened parachute. He hit directly on the wires, bounced off and fell to the ground from a height of several tens of meters.
Pilots and children
Air crash survival statistics show that underage crew members and passengers are significantly more likely to cheat death. With pilots, the situation is clear - in their cockpit, passive safety systems are more reliable than those of other passengers.
Why children survive more often than others is not fully understood. However, several reliable reasons, the researchers of this issue have established:
- increased bone flexibility, general muscle relaxation and a greater percentage of subcutaneous fat that protects internal organs from injury like a pillow;
- small 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 air crashes is brain injury;
- smaller body size, which reduces the likelihood of running into some sharp object at the time of landing.
Invincible Spiritual Power
A successful landing does not always mean a positive outcome. Not every miraculous survivor is instantly found by benevolent locals. For example, in 1971, over the Amazon at an altitude of 3,200 meters, a Lockheed Electra aircraft was destroyed due to a fire caused by lightning in the wing with a fuel tank. 17-year-old German woman Juliana Kopke woke up 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 went along the forest streams, gradually turning into rivers. With a broken collarbone, a bag of sweets and a stick, with which she dispersed stingrays in shallow water, the girl went out to people after 9 days. In Italy, this story was made into the film Miracles Still Happen (1974).
There were 92 people on board, including Kopke. Subsequently, it was found that in addition to 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 trip flight Komsomolsk-on-Amur - Blagoveshchensk. At an altitude of 5,200 meters, the passenger An-24 collided with a Tu-16K bomber.
Larisa and her husband were sitting in the tail 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 a movie about Julian Kopka, who, during the crash, got to the chair, pressed herself into it and survived. Savitskaya did the same. Part of the body of the aircraft, in which the girl remained, fell on a birch grove that softened the blow. She was in the fall for about 8 minutes. Larisa was the only survivor, she was seriously injured, but remained conscious and retained the ability to move independently.
The surname Savitskaya is inscribed twice in the Russian version of the Guinness Book of Records. She is listed as the person who survived after falling from the greatest height. The second record is rather sad - Larisa became the one who received the minimum compensation for physical damage. She was paid only 75 rubles - that's how much, according to the norms of the State Insurance, then it was supposed to survive in a plane crash.
People thrown overboard during a crash almost never survive. And those who did it will never forget Asiana Flight 214 after an emergency landing in San Francisco.
In July of this year, a South Korean Asiana Airlines plane made an emergency landing at San Francisco Airport. A moment before the liner touched the runway, its tail fell off, in which there were five people. A teenage girl from Korea nearly finished sixth.
She was sitting in row 41, where a fault line passed, along which the tail section broke away from the rest of the aircraft.
“Everything that was behind me disappeared in an instant,” she told reporters from Mercury News in broken English. She asked not to be named. Two girls and three stewardesses sat behind them in the fallen tail. “Just now there were two toilets and suddenly there was nothing, just blinding light.”
One of the girls fell out of her seat later than the other four and ended up next to the left wing of the plane. Experts believe that it was covered with a layer of fire-fighting foam, and then hit by a fire truck that arrived at the scene.
A second girl from Row 41 died from injuries sustained after she was dragged along the runway for about 400 meters.
Miraculously, all three flight attendants survived, who were dragged along the ground for more than 300 meters. They were found next to a Boeing 747 waiting to take off. The pilot of this plane saw all this from his cockpit:
“The two survivors, albeit with difficulty, but moved ... I saw how one of them got up and walked a few steps, but then squatted down. Another, also a woman, I think, walked, then fell on her side and remained on the ground until rescuers arrived.
They were so far away from the main body of the plane that it took rescuers 14 minutes to find them.
Today's commercial aircraft carry hundreds of people 10 times faster than they could travel in a car, which in turn is 10 times faster than a human can travel on foot.
And although flights have become a familiar part of our lives, it is difficult for us to even imagine the physical forces that the body of the aircraft we sit inside has to withstand. If a person were outside the porthole, he would almost instantly die under the influence of several factors at once: barotrauma, friction, blunt force, hypoxia - they would still compete which of them would kill us.
And yet, very rarely, but those who find themselves on the wrong side of the aircraft skin survive. Some survived being ejected from flying high altitude passenger aircraft. Some were thrown back by the explosion, others were torn from their chairs at the place of the faults. It happened that people jumped themselves, it happened that someone pushed them.
There are real reasons why crash survival is becoming more common, even if a person is ejected from a plane at high altitude.
If a commercial airliner crashes, there is a good chance of survival. One widely cited statistic puts the survival rate at around 80 percent, and the numbers are rising with each new generation of aircraft.
The aircraft on Asiana Flight 214 was a Boeing 777, one of the newest and safest aircraft to operate. The 777 seats that the flight attendants "ride" on the runway were designed to withstand up to 16 G's of force before being blown off the floor.
In many previous crashes with less secure seats, these torn-off seats have effectively become rocket launchers in the cabin. The solid bracing was supposed to keep the Asiana seats in place, which probably also made them a safe sled for the Asiana crew.
Oddly enough, the earliest documented case of surviving a jet from a commercial flight bears a striking resemblance to the Asiana crash, even though safety science was then half a century younger.
In April 1965, a British United Airways aircraft was descending towards Jersey, an island off the coast of the Channel Coast of France. The pilot, like the Asiana, misjudged the landing approach. In addition, like the Korean plane, the rear end crashed into an object on the ground, the entire tail section was torn off, and the stewardess was ejected from there. Twenty-two-year-old Dominique Silier was found near the wreckage, badly injured but alive. She is the only one left alive.
In the 48 years between these two accidents, the number of people also thrown out of the liners and survived is less than ten (according to data published by the media and collected in amateur databases).
Society reacts to survivors like, "You're so lucky!" But we cannot even imagine what a terrible trauma it is for them. Survivors tend to be reluctant to share their stories.
It is especially worth highlighting cases when people fell out of flying planes and remained alive. The most famous case was that of Juliane Koepke, a teenage girl from Germany who, on Christmas Eve 1971, was thrown out of a plane that exploded over Peru.
While in her chair, she flew about 3,000 meters before falling into a thicket in the jungle. Bruised and missing one shoe, she walked along streams and rivers for 11 days before finding help.
German filmmaker Werner Herzog was also scheduled to fly on that flight and after the tragedy visited the crash site to film his 2000 documentary Wings of Hope.
Nine-year-old Colombian Erica Delgado survived a similar fall in 1995, when her mother pushed her out of a burning plane that crashed near Cartagena. The exact figures are unknown, but another pilot reported an explosion of the plane, which broke into two parts at an altitude of about 3.5 thousand meters. The Delgados landed in the swamp next to the rest of the wreckage.
In 1985, a Galaxy Airlines plane crashed on takeoff from Reno. A row of 17-year-old Lamson's seats was ripped out completely and landed vertically on a nearby road. The teen unbuckled his seatbelts and started running until the billboard he saw brought him back to reality.
Lamson later tried to figure out how he managed to survive in such a mess. Lamson had been diving for a long time, so he followed his instinct and buried his head in his knees, as if in a somersault when the plane was thrown up for the first time. When a row of seats vomited, his legs protected him, and his father, who was sitting next to him, died from a head injury.
This is the answer to the "how" question. The answer to the question "why", many of them will never be able to get it.
Now it is already possible to take stock of the Colombian plane crash that occurred on November 29: of the 81 people on board, only six survived. Some of the passengers of the crashed plane were footballers of the Brazilian club Chapecoense. Of the entire team, only one player survived - defender Alan Ruschel. Surely, when he recovers, he will tell a lot about that fateful flight - as those who were lucky enough not to die in other plane crashes have already done. We have collected several monologues of survivors: what they remember about the crash, what they thought at that moment and why they feel guilty.
10 days in the jungle
risk.ruJuliana Koepcke is the only survivor of the 92 passengers after the plane crash in December 1971. Their Lockheed L-188 Electra aircraft was caught in a thundercloud and lightning damaged its wing. At the time of the disaster, Juliana was 17 years old.
My father Hans-Wilhelm Koepcke was a famous zoologist. That year he was doing research in Peru, in the Amazon jungle. My mother and I flew to him from Lima to celebrate Christmas together. Almost at the very end of the flight, when there were 20 minutes left before landing, the plane fell into a terrible thundercloud, it began to shake violently. Mom got nervous: "I don't like it." I, without looking up, looked out the porthole, beyond which bright lightning torn the darkness, and saw how the right wing caught fire. Mom's last words: "Now it's over." What followed happened very quickly. The plane banked steeply, began to fall and collapse. I still have incredibly loud screams of people in my ears. Strapped to the chair, I quickly flew down somewhere. The wind whistled in my ears. The seat belts hit hard in my stomach. I fell headfirst. Perhaps the most inexplicable thing is that at that moment I was not afraid. Maybe I just didn't have time to be scared? Flying through the clouds, I saw the forest below. My last thought is that the forest looks like broccoli. Then, apparently, I lost consciousness. The plane crash happened around 1:30 am. When I woke up, the hands of my watch, which, oddly enough, walked, showed about nine. It was light. My head and eyes hurt very badly (then the doctors explained to me that at the time of the accident, due to the difference in pressure inside and outside the plane, the eye capillaries burst). I sat still in the same chair, saw a little forest and a little sky. It dawned on me that I survived the plane crash, remembered my mother and lost consciousness again. Then she woke up again. This happened several times. And every time I tried to free myself from the seat to which I was fastened. When I finally succeeded, it began to rain heavily. I forced myself to get up - the body was like cotton wool. With great difficulty, she got to her knees. His eyes turned black again. It must have been half a day before I finally managed to get up. The rain had stopped by then. I started screaming, calling for my mother, hoping that she was also alive. But no one responded.
For 9 days, the seriously wounded Juliana made her way through the jungle to people on her own: the knowledge received from her father helped her survive. Having reached one of the boats tied to the shore along the river, she fell exhausted, and after that she was found by local fishermen. The girl was brought to the nearest village, where her wounds were treated, then to the nearest village, and only then they were transported on a small plane to Pucallpa, where she met with her father. Later it became known that 14 passengers survived the moment of the plane crash, but they all later died from their injuries.
Fell from the sky for eight minutes
Larisa Savitskaya was twice included in the Russian Guinness Book of Records: as a person who survived a fall from a height of 5220 meters, and as a person who received the minimum amount of compensation for physical damage in a plane crash - 75 rubles. On August 24, 1981, together with her husband Vladimir, they were returning from their honeymoon aboard the An-24PB from Komsomolsk-on-Amur to Blagoveshchensk. Their plane at an altitude of 5220 meters was rammed from above by a Tu-16 military bomber: as it turned out later, military and civilian dispatchers incorrectly coordinated the movement of both aircraft in space. An-24 lost its wings from the collision fuel tanks and top of the fuselage. The remaining part during the fall broke several times, and part of the hull, together with Savitskaya, planned for a birch grove. During the fall, the girl held on to the seat, losing consciousness several times. As it turned out later, the fall of Savitskaya, along with the wreckage of the aircraft, lasted approximately eight minutes.
Sometimes they say that in one moment the whole life can fly before your eyes. In eight minutes, you probably won't see anything like that. But I didn't have anything like that. In those moments, I mentally whispered to my husband about how scared I was to die alone. The first thing I saw when I woke up on the ground was him, dead, sitting in a chair across from me. At that moment he seemed to say goodbye to me.
Despite many terrible injuries, Savitskaya was able to move around. She built herself a shelter out of aircraft debris, covered herself with seat covers and plastic bags. Rescue planes, which she waved from below, mistook her for one of the geologists, whose camp was nearby. The girl spent three days in the taiga before she was found. Since the double plane crash in the Soviet Union was immediately classified, there was not a single news about the crash at that time. Savitskaya's ward was guarded by people in civilian clothes, and her mother was "advised to keep quiet." For the first time, Soviet Sport wrote about Savitskaya, but the article said that she fell from a height of five kilometers during the test of a home-made aircraft. Savitskaya was never given a disability, despite the fact that for some time she could not even stand on her feet, and the physical damage was compensated with an amount of 75 rubles. Despite the difficulties, Larisa recovered and even gave birth to a son.
"Why me?"
EsoReiter.ru
highest height, from which a person has ever fallen and remained alive, is 10,160 meters. This person is Vesna Vulovic, a flight attendant for the Yugoslav airliner McDonnell Douglas DC-9-32. On January 26, 1972, the plane exploded in the air (presumably it was a Yugoslav nationalist bomb). Vesna, a 22-year-old girl, is the only survivor of that disaster. She was thrown out of the plane by an explosive wave, and she miraculously survived. The girl was also lucky that the peasant Bruno Honke, who found her first, was able to provide her with first aid before the rescuers arrived. Once in the hospital, Vesna fell into a coma. And as soon as she got out of it, she asked for a smoke.
I didn't have any premonitions. As if I knew in advance that I would survive. I don't remember how I fell. Later they told me that the inhabitants of the place where the wreckage of the plane, the corpses and I fell, heard my cries: “Help me, Lord, help me!” They went to the voice and they found me. At that time, I had already lost four liters of blood. All crew members and passengers suffered a ruptured lung while still in the air, and none of them could survive. They all died before they hit the ground. When I found out that everyone died, and I remained alive, I wanted to die, I felt guilty: why am I alive? For 31 years I did not remember anything about the month I had lived after the accident, and about my problems: paralysis, broken arms, legs, fingers. All this had to be endured. I had to get up. And live well. I think miracles do exist.
“I remember what those children were wearing”
spb.kp.ru
Alexandra Kargapolova is one of the five lucky survivors of the Tu-134 plane crash near Petrozavodsk on June 21, 2011. While landing, the pilots overshot (that night there was very poor visibility), hitting a 50-meter pine tree with their wing. The plane caught fire, went through the forest and crashed, breaking in half. Alexandra recalls that initially they were supposed to fly from Moscow to Petrozavodsk on a Bombardier plane, and only at the landing they were told that they would fly on a Tu-134. Even then, the girl was visited by an unpleasant premonition, but she decided to drive him away from her.
If I had known about this in advance, I would have gone by train ... I flew from Moscow to Karelia, home - to my son and parents. Due to the change of board, passengers began to sit down in all directions. I sat right behind the business class, on the left in front of the wing. Everything was calm, but at some point I realized that we were falling. At that moment, there was silence in the salon. No screams, no panic. Only scared faces. Many at this moment, thank God, slept. I was saved by an unfastened seat belt - I was thrown out of the plane from the impact. I fell on the plowed ground - as if a duvet, as they say, had been laid. Injuries I had, compared with the scale of the disaster, are minimal. I was very lucky. After what happened, it was very difficult to realize that I was alive, but the children who were sitting next to me were not. I don't remember their faces, but I remember how they were dressed. I had a marriage, a child, something in life is built. And the children at the time of their death still had none of this. Why? For the first few months, this thought gnawed at me...
- On average, the possibility of a passenger getting into a plane crash is 1:10,000,000 departures, that is, the risk is minimal.
- There are statistics that show that during a disaster, a much smaller number of passengers are registered on a fatal flight than usual. This allows some mystics to believe that some people are capable of sensing danger.
- Every 2-3 seconds a plane lands or takes off in the world. Around the world, more than 3 million people.