What do the passengers of a falling plane feel. What happens to passengers when a plane crashes?

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Beyond the black box

Dennis Shanagan works from a spacious second-floor office in the house he shares with his wife, Maureen, ten minutes from downtown Carlsbad, California. He has a quiet, sunny office that doesn't look like it's supposed to be a terrible job. Shanagan is a bodily injury expert. He devotes a significant part of his time to the study of wounds and fractures in living people. He is consulted by car manufacturers whose customers are suing on dubious grounds (seat belt torn, I wasn't driving, etc.), which can be verified by the nature of their damage. But in parallel with this, he deals with dead bodies. In particular, he took part in the investigation into the crash of Trans World Airlines Flight 800.

Airplane taking off from international airport named after John F. Kennedy on July 17, 1996 in Paris, exploded in the air over Atlantic Ocean near East Moritch, New York. Eyewitness accounts were conflicting. Some claimed to have seen the plane hit by a rocket. Traces of explosives were found in the wreckage, but no traces of a projectile were found. (Later it turned out that explosives had been planted in the plane long before the crash - as part of a training program for sniffing dogs.) Versions were circulating 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?

Shortly after the crash, Shanagan flew to New York to inspect the bodies of the dead 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 as well. Shanagan knows all 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 (when crashing into high altitude) they could improve their chances of being rescued. I said I would take an hour from him, but I stayed with him for five hours.

A crashed plane can usually tell its own story. Sometimes this story can be heard literally as a result of deciphering the recordings of voices in the cockpit, sometimes conclusions can be drawn as a result of examining broken and burned fragments. crashed plane. But when a plane crashes into the ocean, its history may be incomplete and incoherent. 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, experts turn to what in textbooks on aviation pathological anatomy are called "human debris", that is, to the bodies of passengers. Unlike wings or fuselage fragments, bodies float to the surface of the water. Studying people's injuries (what their type, severity, which side of the body is affected) allows the expert to put together fragments of a terrible picture of what happened.

Shanagan is waiting for me at the airport. He's wearing Dockers boots, a short-sleeved shirt, and pilot-sized glasses. Hair neatly combed in the middle. They look like a wig, but they are real. He is polite, discreet and very pleasant, reminds me of my pharmacist friend Mike.

It doesn't look at all like the portrait I made in my head. I imagined a surly, unfeeling, perhaps verbose person. I planned to conduct an interview in the field, at the crash site of some plane. I imagined the two of us in a mortuary, temporarily built in a small-town dance hall or some university gym, he in a soiled lab coat, me with my notebook. But that was before I realized that Shanagan didn't do autopsies personally. This is done by a team of medical experts from a mortuary located near the crash site. Sometimes he does go to the site and examine the bodies for one reason or another, but still, he mostly works with ready-made autopsy results, correlating them with the passenger boarding plan to identify the location of the source of damage. He informs 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 accidents 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 (because I can't report from the crash site), Shanagan hands me a book called Aerospace Pathology, which he assures me has pictures of things I could to see at the crash site. I open the book to the Body Position section. Scattered on the diagram showing the location of the aircraft fragments are small black dots. Lines are drawn from these points to descriptions that are outside the scheme: “brown leather shoes”, “co-pilot”, “fragment of the spine”, “stewardess”. Gradually, I get to the chapter that describes Shanaghan's work ("The nature of human injury in air crashes"). Photo captions remind researchers, for example, that "high heat can cause steam to form inside the skull, leading to skull rupture, which can be confused with impact damage." It becomes clear to me that the black dots with captions give me quite a good idea of the consequences of the disaster, as if I had visited the site of a plane crash.

In the event of a TWA 800 crash, Shanagan suspected a bomb explosion had caused the crash. He analyzed the nature of the damage to the bodies to prove that the plane had exploded. If he had found traces of explosives, he would have tried to find out where the bomb had been planted on the plane. He pulls a thick folder from his desk drawer and pulls out his group's report. Here - chaos and gore, the result of the largest plane crash passenger aircraft in figures, diagrams, and diagrams. The nightmare has been transformed into something that can be discussed over coffee at the morning meeting of the National Transportation Safety Committee. “4:19. In surfaced victims, the 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 Shanaghan whether a businesslike and detached view of the tragedy helps to suppress what seems to me a natural emotional experience. He looks down at his hands, fingers intertwined, resting on the Flight 800 case file.

“Maureen can tell you that I didn’t manage 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 flew to Paris. Young couples. It was very hard for all of us." Shanaghan adds that this is an atypical state of experts at the crash site. “In general, people don't want to dive too deep into a tragedy, so joking and talking freely is a pretty common demeanor. But not in this case."

For Shanagan, the most unpleasant thing about this case was that most of the bodies were practically intact. “The integrity of the bodies worries me more than its absence,” he says. Things that most of us find hard to look at - severed arms, legs, pieces of the body - for Shanagan, a fairly familiar sight. “In that case, it's just fabric. You can make your thoughts flow in the right direction and do your job.” It's blood, but it doesn't cause sadness. You can get used to working with blood. But with broken lives, no. Shanagan works just like any pathologist. “You focus on individual parts, not on the person as a person. At autopsy, 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 unraveling whether there was an explosion or not. We are on the sixteenth page of the report. Item 4.7: "Fragmentation of bodies." “People near the epicenter of the explosion are being torn apart,” Dennis informs me quietly. This man has an amazing ability to talk about such things in a way that is neither overly patronizing nor overly colorful. If there had been a bomb on the plane, Shanagan would have found a cluster of "heavily fragmented bodies" corresponding to the passengers in 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 facilitate the work of people like Shanagan, who have to analyze a large number of information, medical experts apply such a code. Specifically, the bodies of passengers on Flight 800 were labeled green (intact body), yellow (head crushed or one limb missing), blue (two limbs missing, head crushed 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 the “foreign bodies” that have stuck into the bodies of the victims. This is a routine analysis that is performed using an X-ray machine as part of the investigation into the causes of any air crash. During the explosion, fragments of the bomb itself, as well as nearby objects, scatter to the sides, hitting people sitting around. The nature of the distribution of these foreign bodies may shed light on the question of whether there was a bomb, and if so, where. If the explosion occurred, for example, in the toilet on the right side of the aircraft, the people sitting facing the toilet would be injured on the front side of the torso. Passengers at the aisle on the opposite side would have been wounded in the right side. However, Shanagan did not find any injuries of this kind.

Some of the bodies bore traces of chemical burns. This served as the basis for the emergence of a version that the cause of the disaster was a collision with a rocket. It is true that chemical burns in aircraft crashes are usually caused by contact with highly corrosive fuels, but Shanaghan 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 the faces. To finally confirm the correctness of his version, Shanagan checked that the chemical burns were only on the bodies that floated to the surface and only on the back. If the explosion had occurred in an airplane, the splattered fuel would have burned people's faces and sides, but not their backs, which were protected by the seatbacks. So, no evidence of a missile impact.

Shanagan also drew attention to thermal burns caused by flames. A diagram was attached to the report. Investigating the nature of the location of burns on the body (in most cases, the front part of the body was burned), he was able to trace the movement of fire through the aircraft. Then he found out how badly the seats of these passengers were burned - it turned out to be much stronger 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 started. A version began to take shape that the fuel tank in the wing had exploded. The explosion occurred far enough away from the passengers (and therefore the bodies remained intact), but it was strong enough to break the integrity of the aircraft 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. Shanagan replied that if the integrity of the aircraft is violated, huge forces begin to act. Unlike a projectile explosion, the body usually remains intact, but a powerful wave is capable of pulling a person out of a chair. “These planes fly at speeds of over 500 kilometers an hour,” Shanaghan continues. - When a crack appears, the aerodynamic properties of the aircraft change. The motors are still pushing him forward, but he is losing his footing. It starts spinning with monstrous force. The crack widens, and in five or six seconds the plane falls apart. My theory is that the plane fell apart fairly quickly, the seatbacks fell off and people slipped out of the straps that held them in place.

The nature of the injuries on the passengers of Flight 800 confirmed his theory: most people had massive internal trauma, which is usually observed, in the words of Shanagan, with "extremely strong impact on the water." A person falling from a height hits the surface of the water and almost immediately stops, 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 return. Often in falls, the aorta ruptures, because one part of it is fixed in the body (and stops moving along with the body), while 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 cause it to rupture. Serious damage to the aorta was found in 73% of the passengers on Flight 800.

In addition, when a body falling from a great height hits the water, rib fractures often occur. This fact was documented by former employees of the Institute of Civil Aeromedicine Richard Snyder and Clyde Snow. In 1968, Snyder studied autopsies of 169 suicide bombers who had thrown themselves off the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. 85% had broken ribs, 15% had a broken spine, and only a third had broken limbs. By itself, a fracture of the ribs is not dangerous, but with a very strong blow, the ribs can pierce what is under them: the heart, lung, aorta. In 76% of the cases studied by Snyder and Snow, the ribs pierced the lung. The statistics in the case of the Flight 800 crash were very similar: most of those who died had some form of injury associated with a strong impact on the surface of the water. All had blunt chest injuries, 99% had broken ribs, 88% had torn lungs, and 73% had an 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 a three-minute fall from a height? Alive, perhaps. “If by life you mean the beating of the heart and breathing,” says Shanagan. “Yes, there must have been many.” Did they understand? Dennis thinks it's unlikely. “I think it's unlikely. Seats and passengers fly apart. I think people are completely disoriented.” Shanagan interviewed hundreds of car and plane crash survivors about what they saw and felt during the crash. “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 that it concerned me, but, on the other hand, I understood that I was part of the events.

Knowing how many passengers on Flight 800 had fallen out of the plane in the crash, I wondered if any of them had even a slim chance of surviving. If you enter the water like a sports diver, is it possible to survive after falling from a plane from a great height? It happened at least once. In 1963, Richard Snyder studied cases of people surviving falling from great heights. In the work “Survival of people in free fall”, he cites the case when one person fell out of an airplane at a height of 10 km and survived, although he lived only half a day. Moreover, the poor fellow was not lucky - he did not fall into the water, but to the ground (however, when falling from such a height, the difference is already small). Snyder found that the speed of a person's movement when hitting the ground does not unambiguously predict the severity of the injury. He spoke to runaway lovers who were more seriously injured by falling down stairs than a thirty-six-year-old suicide who threw himself on concrete from a height of more than twenty meters. This man got up and went, and he needed nothing more than a band-aid and a visit to a psychotherapist.

Generally speaking, people who fall from airplanes usually don't fly anymore. According to Snyder's article, maximum speed, at which a person has a tangible chance of surviving when immersed in water feet first (this is 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 already achieved when falling from a height of 150 meters, few people will be able to fall from a height of 8000 meters from an exploding plane, survive and then be interviewed by Dennis Shanagan.

Was Shanagan right about what happened to Flight 800? Yes. Gradually, all the main details of the aircraft were found, and his hypothesis was confirmed. The final conclusion was this: sparks from damaged electrical wiring ignited fuel vapors, which caused the explosion of one of the fuel tanks.

The unhappy science of human injury began in 1954 when British Comet planes for some unknown reason began to fall 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 large depth of immersion of the wreckage of many parts of the fuselage, it was not possible to extract, so the experts had to study the "medical evidence", that is, examine the bodies of twenty-one passengers found on the surface of the water.

The studies were carried out at the Royal Air Force Institute of Aviation Medicine at Farnborough under the direction of Captain W. C. Stewart and Sir Harold E. Whittingham, Director of Medical Services for the national British Airline. Since Sir Harold had more than all possible titles (at least five, not counting the title of nobility, were indicated in the article published on the results of the study), I decided that it was he who supervised the work.
Sir Harold and his group immediately drew attention to the peculiarity of the damage to the bodies. All bodies had quite a few external injuries and at the same time very serious damage to internal organs, especially the lungs. It was known that such lung injuries as were found in the passengers of the Comet could be caused by three causes: a bomb explosion, sudden decompression (which occurs when the pressurization of the aircraft cabin is broken), and a fall from a very high altitude. In a catastrophe such as this, all three factors may have played a role. Until this point, the dead hadn't helped much in solving the mystery of the plane crash.
The first version, which began to be considered, was associated with a bomb explosion. But not a single body was burned, not a single body was found to have fragments of objects that could fly apart in an explosion, and not a single body, as Dennis Shanagan would have noted, was torn to pieces. So the idea of a crazy and hateful ex-airline employee familiar with explosives was quickly dropped.

Then a group of researchers considered the version of the sudden depressurization of the cabin. Could this lead to such severe lung damage? To answer this question, the 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 respiratory failure." Other experimental data, obtained both in animals and in humans, similarly showed only a small negative effect of pressure changes, which in no way reflected the condition of the light passengers of the Comet.

As a result, only the latest version - "extremely strong impact on the water" - could be considered as the cause of the death of the passengers of the aircraft, and the collapse of the hull at high altitude, possibly due to some structural defect, could be considered as the cause of the disaster. 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 establish exactly what happens to the lungs when a body hits water at top speed. When I first encountered animals in the text, I imagined Sir Harold heading for the Dover Rocks with a cage of rodents and throwing innocent animals into the water where his comrades were waiting in a rowboat with nets. However, Sir Harold did a more meaningful thing: he and his assistants created a "vertical catapult" that allows you to achieve the required speed at a much shorter distance. “Guinea pigs,” he wrote, “were attached with adhesive tape to the bottom surface of the carrier, so that when it stopped at the bottom position of its trajectory, the animals flew belly forward from a height of about 80 cm and fell into the water.” I can well imagine what a boy Sir Harold was as a child.

In short, the lungs of the ejected guinea pigs closely resembled those of the Comet's passengers. The researchers concluded that the planes broke apart at high altitude, causing most of the passengers to fall out of them and fall into the sea. To understand where the fuselage cracked, the researchers paid attention to whether the passengers who were lifted from the surface of the water were dressed or undressed. According to Sir Harold's theory, a person hitting the water when 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 collapse line of the aircraft along the border between naked and dressed passengers. In the cases of both aircraft, the people whose seats were at the rear of the aircraft should have been found clothed, while the passengers closest to the cockpit would have been found naked or with most of their clothes off.

To prove this theory, Sir Harold lacked one thing: there was no evidence that a person loses 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 1950s wool suits and dresses, took part in the next round of Farnborough trials, unfortunately guinea pigs were not used in this part of the study. Several fully dressed mannequins* were dropped into the sea from a Royal Aircraft Center aircraft. As Sir Harold expected, they lost their clothes when they hit the water, and this fact was confirmed by the investigator Gary Erickson, who performed the autopsy of suicides who threw themselves into the water from the Golden Gate Bridge. As he told me, even when falling from a height of only 75 m, "the shoes usually fly off, the trousers are torn along the gusset, the back pockets are torn off."

*You may be interested, as I was wondering, if human corpses were ever 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 papers: J. K. Earley, “Body Terminal Velocity,” dated 1964, and J. S. Cotner, “Analysis of the effect of air resistance on the rate of fall 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.K. Earley had used dummies in his research, he would have written the word "dummies" in the title of the article, so I suspect that several bodies donated for scientific purposes did indeed jump into the water from height. - Note. ed.

In the end, a significant part of the Comet fragments was 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 we can calmly talk at the table. When the waiter comes over to refill our water, I trail off as if we're talking about something secret or very personal. Shanagan doesn't seem to care. The waiter peppers my salad endlessly, while Dennis says that "...a specialized trawler was used to extract the 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 happen 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 the word "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 that you will survive. Federal law requires aircraft manufacturers to provide the ability to evacuate all passengers through half of the aircraft's emergency exits in 90 seconds. Unfortunately, in a real situation, evacuation rarely goes according to plan. “When you look at disasters where people can be saved, it's rare that even half of the emergency exits are open,” says Shanaghan. “Plus, there is chaos and panic on the plane.” Shanagan gives the example of the Delta plane crash in Dallas. “In this accident, it was quite possible to save all the people. People received very few injuries. But many died in the fire. They crowded around the emergency exits, but they couldn't open them." Fire is the number one killer in plane crashes. It does not take a strong blow to explode the fuel tank and the fire engulfed the entire aircraft. Passengers die of suffocation as the air becomes scalding hot and filled with toxic smoke from the burning skin of the aircraft. People also die because they break their legs, crashing into the seat in front of them, and cannot crawl to the exit. Passengers cannot follow the evacuation plan in the required order: they run in panic, pushing and trampling each other*.

* Here lies the secret to surviving such catastrophes: you have to be a man. In a 1970 Institute of Civil Aeromedicine analysis of three aircraft crashes using an emergency evacuation system, the most important factor contributing to human survival was gender (the second most important factor, following the proximity of the passenger seat to the passenger seat). emergency exit). Adult males have a significantly higher chance of being saved. Why? Probably because they are capable of sweeping everyone else out of the way. - Note. ed.

Can manufacturers make their planes less flammable? Of course they can. They can design more emergency exits, but they don't want to because it will lead to a reduction in seats in the cabin and lower income. They can install water sprinklers or shock-resistant systems to protect fuel tanks, as in military helicopters. But they don’t want to do that either, because it will make the plane heavier, and more weight means more fuel consumption.

Who decides to sacrifice human lives but save money? Allegedly the Federal Aviation Agency. The problem is that most aircraft safety improvements are evaluated in terms of cost-benefit. To quantify the "benefit", each life saved is expressed in dollar terms. As calculated in 1991 by the US Institute for Urban Development, each person is worth $2.7 million. "It's the financial expression of a person's death and its impact on society," FAA spokesman Van Goody told me. Although this figure greatly exceeds the cost of raw materials, the numbers in the "benefit" column rarely rise to such levels as to exceed the cost of manufacturing aircraft. To explain his words, Goody used the example of three-point seat belts (which, like in a car, are thrown both over the waist and over 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 such a security system, we need six hundred and sixty-nine million dollars. Here are the shoulder straps.

Why doesn't the FAA say, “Expensive. But are you still going to release 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 introduce new rules, it should provide the industry with a cost-benefit analysis and wait for a response," says Shanaghan. - If the industrialists do not like the alignment, they go to their congressman. If you represent the Boeing Company, you have tremendous influence in Congress.”*

*It is for this reason that modern aircraft do not have airbags. Believe it or not, an airbag system for aircraft (called an airstop restraint system) was designed; it consists of three parts protecting 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 was in excellent condition. The designers drew on stories from World War II combat aircraft pilots who inflated their life jackets. - Note. ed. Starting in 2001, to improve the safety of passengers, aircraft began to install shoulder belts and airbags. At the end of 2010, airbags were installed on 60 airlines around the world, and this figure is constantly growing. - Note. per.

In the FAA's defense, the agency recently approved the introduction of a new system that pumps nitrogen-enriched air into the fuel tanks, which reduces the oxygen content in the fuel and, therefore, the likelihood of an explosion that led, for example, to the TWA 800 flight.

I ask Dennis for some advice to those passengers who, after reading this book, every time they board an airplane, will think about whether they will end their lives trampled by other passengers at the emergency exit door. He says that best advice- stick to common sense. Sit closer to the emergency exit. In case of fire, bend as low as possible to avoid hot air and smoke. Hold your breath as long as possible so as not to burn your lungs and inhale toxic gases. Shanagan himself prefers window seats, as aisle passengers are more likely to be hit on the head by bags falling from a storage compartment above the seats, which can open even with a slight push.

As we wait for the waiter with the bill, I ask Shanagan the question he's been asked at every cocktail for the past twenty years: Are the passengers in the front or the back more likely to survive a plane crash? “It depends,” he patiently replies, “what type of accident we are talking about.” I'll reformulate the question. If he has the opportunity to choose his seat on the plane, where does he sit?

"First grade," he replies.

I've always wondered what people experience in a falling plane. Summarizing the experience of eyewitnesses who survived in plane crashes, one interesting conclusion can be drawn - the devil is not so terrible as he is painted ...

First, be more afraid when you drive to the airport. In 2014, over 33 million flights were made in the world, 21 air crashes occurred (moreover, most of the trouble in the sky falls on freight transportation), in which only 990 people died. Those. the probability of a plane crash is only 0.0001%. During the same year, in Russia alone, 26,963 people died in traffic accidents, and according to WHO, 1.2 million people die in road accidents and about 50 million are injured annually in the world.

Secondly, judging by the statistics, you are much more likely to die on an escalator in the subway or contract AIDS than to die on an airplane. So the chance of dying in a plane crash is 1 in 11,000,000, while, for example, in a car accident - 1 in 5,000, so now it is much safer to fly than drive a car. Moreover, every year aviation technology becomes safer. By the way, Africa remains the most unfavorable continent in terms of flight safety: only 3% of all flights in the world are operated here, but 43% of air crashes have occurred!

Thirdly, with strong overloads, you will not remember anything. According to the research of the Interstate Aviation Committee, the consciousness of a person in a falling plane is turned off. In most cases - in the first seconds of the fall. At the moment of impact with the ground in the cabin there is not a single person who would be conscious. As they say, a protective reaction of the body is triggered. This thesis is confirmed by those who managed to survive in plane crashes. Silence also accompanies minor air incidents, a selection of videos

Fourth, the experience of surviving plane crashes. The story of Larisa Savitskaya is listed in the Guinness Book of Records. In 1981, at an altitude of 5220 meters, the An-24 aircraft in which she was flying collided with a military bomber. 37 people died in that crash. Only Larisa managed to survive.

I was then 20 years old, - says Larisa Savitskaya. - Volodya, my husband, and I flew from Komsomolsk-on-Amur to Blagoveshchensk. I fell asleep immediately after takeoff. And woke up from the roar and screams. His face was cold. Then I was told that our plane had its wings cut off and the roof blown off. But I don't remember the sky above my head. I remember it was foggy, like in a bathhouse. I looked at Volodya. He didn't move. Blood splattered across his face. I knew right away that he was dead. And prepared to die too. Then the plane broke up, and I lost consciousness. When she came to herself, she was surprised that she was still alive. I felt like I was lying on something hard. It turned out to be in the aisle between the chairs. And near the whistling abyss. There were no thoughts in my head. Fear too. In the state I was in - between sleep and reality - there is no fear. The only thing that came to mind was an episode from an Italian film where a girl, after a plane crash, soared in the sky among the clouds, and then, having fallen into the jungle, remained alive. I didn't expect to survive. I just wanted to die without pain. I noticed the crossbars of the metal floor. And I thought: if I fall sideways, it will be very painful. I decided to change position and regroup. Then she crawled to the next row of chairs (our row stood near the break), sat down in a chair, clutched the armrests and rested her feet on the floor. All this was done automatically. Then I look - the earth. Very close. She grabbed the armrests with all her might and pushed herself away from the chair. Then - like a green explosion from larch branches. And again a memory failure. When I woke up, I saw my husband again. Volodya sat with his hands on his knees and looked at me with a fixed gaze. It was raining, which washed the blood from his face, and I saw a huge wound on his forehead. Under the armchairs lay a dead man and woman ...

Later it was established that a piece of the plane - four meters long and three wide, on which Savitskaya fell, planned like an autumn leaf. He fell into a soft marshy clearing. Larisa lay unconscious for seven hours. Then for two more days I sat in a chair in the rain and waited for death to come. On the third day I got up, started looking for people and came across a search party. Larisa received several injuries, a concussion, a broken arm and five cracks in her spine. You can't go with these injuries. But Larisa refused the stretcher and reached the helicopter herself.

The plane crash and the death of her husband remained with her forever. According to her, her feelings of pain and fear are dulled. She is not afraid of death and still quietly flies on airplanes.

Another case confirms the disconnection of consciousness. Arina Vinogradova is one of the two surviving stewardesses of the Il-86 aircraft, which in 2002, having barely taken off, fell into Sheremetyevo. There were 16 people on board: four pilots, ten flight attendants and two engineers. Only two flight attendants survived: Arina and her friend Tanya Moiseeva. They say that in the last seconds, your whole life scrolls before your eyes. This didn’t happen to me, ”Arina tells Izvestia. - Tanya and I were sitting in the first row of the third cabin, at the emergency exit, but not in service chairs, but in passenger ones. Tanya is in front of me. The flight was technical - we just had to return to Pulkovo. At some point, the plane shook. This happens with the "IL-86". But for some reason I realized that we were falling. Although nothing seemed to happen, there was no siren or roll. I didn't get scared. Consciousness instantly swam somewhere, and I fell into a black void. I woke up with a sharp shock. At first I didn't understand anything. Then it slowly unraveled. It turned out that I was lying on a warm engine, littered with chairs. She couldn't pull herself away. She began to scream, pound on the metal and shake Tanya, who either raised her head or lost consciousness again. We were pulled out by firefighters and taken to different hospitals.

Arina still works as a flight attendant. The plane crash, she said, left no trauma in her soul. However, the incident affected Tatyana Moiseeva very strongly. Since then, she no longer flies, although she has not left aviation.

Fifth, a plane crash is a positive experience for survivors! Scientists came to unique conclusions: people who survived plane crashes later turned out to be healthier from a psychological point of view. They showed less anxiety, anxiety, did not fall into depression and did not experience post-traumatic stress, in contrast to the subjects from the control group, who had never had such an experience.

In conclusion, I bring to your attention, the speech of Rick Elias, who was sitting on the front row of the plane that committed emergency landing into the Hudson River in New York in January 2009. You will find out what thoughts came to his mind as the doomed plane fell down ...

Original taken from valkiriarf What Passenger Bodies Can Tell About a Plane Crash

Beyond the black box

Dennis Shanagan works from a spacious second-floor office in the house he shares with his wife, Maureen, ten minutes from downtown Carlsbad, California. He has a quiet, sunny office that doesn't look like it's supposed to be a terrible job. Shanagan is an expert on bodily harm. He devotes a significant part of his time to the study of wounds and fractures in living people. He is consulted by car manufacturers whose customers are suing on dubious grounds (seat belt torn, I wasn't driving, etc.), which can be verified by the nature of their damage. But in parallel with this, he deals with dead bodies. In particular, he took part in the investigation into the crash of Trans World Airlines Flight 800.

The plane, which took off from John F. Kennedy International Airport on July 17, 1996 for Paris, exploded in mid-air over the Atlantic Ocean near East Morich, New York. Eyewitness accounts were conflicting. Some claimed to have seen the plane hit by a rocket. Traces of explosives were found in the wreckage, but no traces of a projectile were found. (Later it turned out that explosives had been planted in the plane long before the crash - as part of a training program for sniffing dogs.) Versions spread 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?

Shortly after the crash, Shanagan flew to New York to inspect the bodies of the dead 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 as well. Shanagan knows all 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's going on, and how (in a low altitude crash) they could improve their chances of survival. I said I would take an hour from him, but I stayed with him for five hours.

A crashed plane can usually tell its own story. Sometimes this story can be heard literally—as a result of transcribing voice recordings in the cockpit; But when a plane crashes into the ocean, its history may be incomplete and incoherent. 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, experts turn to what in textbooks on aviation pathological anatomy are called "human debris", that is, to the bodies of passengers. Unlike wings or fuselage fragments, bodies float to the surface of the water. Studying people's injuries (what their type, severity, which side of the body is affected) allows the expert to put together fragments of a terrible picture of what happened.

In the event of a TWA 800 crash, Shanagan suspected a bomb explosion had caused the crash. He analyzed the nature of the damage to the bodies to prove that the plane had exploded. If he had found traces of explosives, he would have tried to find out where the bomb had been planted on the plane. He pulls a thick folder from his desk drawer and pulls out his group's report. Here - chaos and gore, the result of the largest air crash of a passenger plane in numbers, diagrams, and diagrams. The nightmare has been transformed into something that can be discussed over coffee at the morning meeting of the National Transportation Safety Committee. “4:19. In surfaced victims, the 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 Shanaghan whether a businesslike and detached view of the tragedy helps to suppress what seems to me a natural emotional experience. He looks down at his hands, fingers intertwined, resting on the Flight 800 case file.

“Maureen can tell you that I didn’t manage 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 flew to Paris. Young couples. It was very hard for all of us." Shanaghan adds that this is an atypical state of experts at the crash site. “In general, people don’t want to dive into tragedy too deeply, so jokes and free chatting is pretty 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 integrity of the bodies worries me more than its absence,” he says. Things that most of us find hard to look at - severed arms, legs, pieces of the body - for Shanagan, a fairly familiar sight. “In that case, it’s just cloth. You can make your thoughts flow in the right direction and do your job.” It's blood, but it doesn't cause sadness. You can get used to working with blood. But with broken lives, no. Shanagan works just like any pathologist. “You focus on individual parts, not on the person as a person. At autopsy, 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 unraveling whether there was an explosion or not. We are on the sixteenth page of the report. Item 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 such things in a way that is neither overly patronizing nor overly colorful. If there had been a bomb on the plane, Shanagan would have found a cluster of "heavily fragmented bodies" corresponding to the passengers in 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 facilitate the work of people like Shanagan, who must analyze a large amount of information, medical experts use such a code. Specifically, the bodies of passengers on Flight 800 were labeled green (intact body), yellow (head crushed or one limb missing), blue (two limbs missing, head crushed or intact), or red (three or more limbs missing or complete body fragmentation).

I asked why the passengers were carried out of the plane, because they were wearing seat belts. Shanagan replied that if the integrity of the aircraft is violated, huge forces begin to act. Unlike a projectile explosion, the body usually remains intact, but a powerful wave is capable of pulling a person out of a chair. “These planes fly at over 500 kilometers an hour,” Shanaghan continues. - When a crack appears, the aerodynamic properties of the aircraft change. The motors are still pushing him forward, but he is losing his footing. It starts spinning with monstrous force. The crack widens, and in five or six seconds the plane falls apart. My theory is that the plane fell apart fairly quickly, the seatbacks fell off and people slipped out of the straps that held them in place.

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 tangible chance of surviving 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 already achieved when falling from a height of 150 meters, few people will be able to fall from a height of 8000 meters from an exploding plane, survive and then be interviewed by Dennis Shanagan.

The unhappy science of human injury began in 1954 when British Comet planes for some unknown reason began to fall 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 large depth of immersion of the wreckage of many parts of the fuselage, it was not possible to extract, so the experts had to study the "medical evidence", that is, examine the bodies of twenty-one passengers found on the surface of the water.

Then a group of researchers considered the version of the sudden depressurization of the cabin. Could this lead to such severe lung damage? To answer this question, the experts used guinea pigs and tested their reactions 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 respiratory failure." Other experimental data, obtained both in animals and in humans, similarly showed only a small negative effect of pressure changes, which in no way reflected the condition of the light passengers of the Comet.

As a result, only the latest version, “extremely strong impact on the water,” could be considered as the cause of the death of the passengers of the aircraft, and the collapse of the hull at high altitude, possibly due to some structural defect, could be considered as the cause of the disaster. 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 establish exactly what happens to the lungs when a body hits water at top speed. When I first encountered animals in the text, I imagined Sir Harold heading for the Dover Rocks with a cage of rodents and throwing innocent animals into the water where his comrades were waiting in a rowboat with nets. However, Sir Harold did a more meaningful thing: he and his assistants created a "vertical catapult" that allows you to achieve the required speed at a much shorter distance. “Guinea pigs,” he wrote, “were attached with adhesive tape to the bottom surface of the carrier, so that when it stopped at the bottom position of its trajectory, the animals flew belly forward from a height of about 80 cm and fell into the water.” I can well imagine what a boy Sir Harold was as a child.

* Here lies the secret to surviving such catastrophes: you have to be a man. In a 1970 Institute of Civil Aeromedicine analysis of three air crashes using an emergency evacuation system, the most important factor contributing to human survival is gender (second only to the proximity of the passenger seat to the emergency exit). Adult males have a significantly higher chance of being saved. Why? Probably because they are capable of sweeping everyone else out of the way. — Note. ed.

Can manufacturers make their planes less flammable? Of course they can. They can design more emergency exits, but they are reluctant to do so as this will result in reduced cabin seating and lower revenue. They can install water sprinklers or shock-resistant systems to protect fuel tanks, as in military helicopters. But they don’t want to do that either, because it will make the plane heavier, and more weight means more fuel consumption.

Who decides to sacrifice human lives but save money? Allegedly the Federal Aviation Agency. The problem is that most aircraft safety improvements are evaluated in terms of cost-benefit. To quantify the "benefit", each life saved is expressed in dollar terms. As calculated in 1991 by the US Institute for Urban Development, each person is worth $2.7 million. “This is the financial expression of the death of a person and its impact on society,” FAA spokesman Van Goody told me. Although this figure greatly exceeds the cost of raw materials, the numbers in the "benefit" column rarely rise to such levels as to exceed the cost of manufacturing aircraft. To explain his words, Goody used the example of three-point seat belts (which, like in a car, are thrown both over the waist and over 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 such a security system, we need six hundred and sixty-nine million dollars. Here are the shoulder straps.

Why doesn't the FAA say, “Expensive. But are you still going to release 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 introduce new rules, it should provide the industry with a cost-benefit analysis and wait for a response,” says Shanaghan. - If the industrialists do not like the deal, they go to their congressman. If you represent the Boeing Company, you have tremendous influence in Congress.”*

*It is for this reason that modern aircraft do not have airbags. Believe it or not, an airbag system for aircraft (called an airstop restraint system) was designed; it consists of three parts protecting 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 was in excellent condition. The designers drew on the stories of World War II combat aircraft pilots who had time to inflate their life jackets just before an accident. — Note. ed. Starting in 2001, to improve the safety of passengers, aircraft began to install shoulder belts and airbags. At the end of 2010, airbags were installed on 60 airlines around the world, and this figure is constantly growing. — Note. per.

In the FAA's defense, the agency recently approved the introduction of a new system that pumps nitrogen-enriched air into the fuel tanks, which reduces the oxygen content in the fuel and, therefore, the likelihood of an explosion that led, for example, to the TWA 800 flight.

I ask Dennis for some advice to those passengers who, after reading this book, every time they board an airplane, will think about whether they will end their lives 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 as low as possible to avoid hot air and smoke. Hold your breath as long as possible so as not to burn your lungs and inhale toxic gases. Shanagan himself prefers window seats, as aisle passengers are more likely to be hit on the head by bags falling from a storage compartment above the seats, which can open even with a slight push.

As we wait for the waiter with the bill, I ask Shanagan the question he's been asked at every cocktail for the past twenty years: Are the passengers in the front or the back more likely to survive a plane crash? “It depends,” he patiently replies, “what type of accident you are talking about.” I'll reformulate the question. If he has the opportunity to choose his seat on the plane, where does he sit?

“First grade,” he replies.

A lot of people are terrified of flying on airplanes, despite the fact that air transport is the fastest and most convenient. Of course, the biggest fear is the crash of an airliner, and what people feel when the plane crashes can only be told by those who really experienced these feelings. Of course, an air transport crash can occur, but you should not think that only an airplane poses a clear threat to human life. And if we take into account the experience of those who were able to survive the fall of air transport, then we can come to the conclusion that this is not so scary, as many imagined for themselves.

Before canceling a flight for fear of an airliner crash, you should understand that a disaster can await people everywhere, even in a car that delivers a person to the airport. According to statistics, there are no more than 20 crashes per 30 million flights, and not on passenger ships, but on cargo ships, on board of which there is a minimum number of people. And many more people die in traffic accidents. For example, during the year, more than a million people died in road accidents around the world and approximately 45 million were seriously injured.

Analysts say that people on the ground are much more likely to die than in the sky. After all, danger can be found almost anywhere.

Here are the most common reasons:

In the subway or in the elevator.
When communicating with a person infected with AIDS.
While driving a car or just sitting in the passenger seat.

That is why flying on airliners is now much safer, especially since they are becoming more and more perfect every year. And, of course, you should not read articles before the flight that tell how people feel when the plane crashes, since such stories are mostly very embellished.

Feelings of congestion in air transport

Scientific research has found out what happens to people when an airplane crashes, or rather, when air transport is heavily overloaded. It turns out that a person will remember practically nothing, since with strong overloads, the human consciousness, as they say, “defends itself”. That is, the passengers of a falling plane feel only the first seconds of the fall, and then their consciousness simply turns off. Studies of air crashes have shown that when an airliner collided with the surface of the earth, not a single passenger was conscious, which means that he did not realize or feel anything. This fact was confirmed by those who were able to survive after the crash. They said that they remember only a strong jolt and a feeling of overload.

Actions of pilots in case of an aircraft crash

The pilot of an airplane is the same person, during a plane crash he feels the same sensations as all the passengers, but he simply has to be completely focused in order to try to take control of a difficult situation. No one in the cockpit sorts things out, as is often seen in feature films, the actions of the pilots are professional and cold-blooded, because it is their calmness and skills that, in some situations, help to successfully land a faulty aircraft.

There are many modern devices in the cockpit:

device with voice warning;
a device indicating a sharp change in altitude;
monitor indicating a possible collision with another aircraft.

But not always instruments can help pilots, especially if events develop very rapidly and the crew simply does not have time to fully comprehend everything.
At emergency professional pilots use only their skills, not trusting electronic technology, and quite often it is this solution that saves the plane and all passengers from a crash.

On board, you will have access to instructions in case of an emergency. Be sure to read it!

Is it possible for a passenger to survive an airliner crash?

Watching feature films, many have already been able to imagine in what scenario the plane crashes. In a nutshell, you can say this:

air transport is in the sky for a long time;
then he starts shaking violently;
a hole is formed in the body into which passengers fly.

As a result, a strong explosion breaks the air transport and the passengers in it, so there is absolutely no chance of survival.

But this is just a fictional scenario, according to statistics, more than 75% of air crashes occur on takeoff or runway Therefore, there are practically no human casualties.
But if, nevertheless, the disaster begins at a decent height, passengers, in order to survive, should clearly follow all the rules that the stewardess will say.

Every person during a plane crash feels panic and fear, they can force him to get up from his seat or unfasten his seat belts. And then other passengers will follow his example and real panic and chaos will begin on board, which will only prevent the pilot from trying to land the plane that has lost control.

After all, even if the engines of an airliner refuse to work at high altitude, an experienced pilot can try to land an uncontrollable aircraft thanks to the aerodynamics of transport. It is she who allows a heavy airliner to soar in the sky and smoothly descend, and not instantly fall with a huge load to the ground.

Studies have shown that by losing 1 meter of altitude, the aircraft manages to cover a distance of 15.5 meters, which is very helpful for pilots. But control will only be maintained if the passengers on board stop panicking and fully follow the instructions. Only in this way will pilots be able to keep an out-of-control aircraft in the sky that can fly hundreds of kilometers to get to the safest landing site.

Summing up, we can say that flights on modern airliners, flown by real professionals, are not as dangerous as many might imagine. Therefore, you should not read a lot of horror stories about what happens to people when an airplane crashes, because danger can lie in wait for a person everywhere and you can’t run far from fate, as they say. Buy tickets for air Transport you can safely, especially since such a trip will be quick and comfortable.

In contact with

Valery Valiulin

Is it necessary, right?

Based on real events. Names and surnames are excluded.

Arriving early in the morning for the service, to perform the next training flights, I was very upset - the flights were repulsed. Flights are not often repulsed, mainly due to weather conditions that do not allow their implementation, in the absence of weather at alternate airfields, in case of accidents and disasters of the same type of aircraft, and there are few other reasons to reschedule flights to another day. The reason for the end of flights stunned me - in the unit from which I transferred three years earlier, my friend, the commander of the ship with which I flew, once two years in the same crew, died.

Subsequently, the flight and engineering staff of all aviation units were informed of the results of the investigation of the disaster, the reasons that led to the death of people and the loss of the combat vehicle, recommendations on measures to prevent the recurrence of such tragedies in the future.

The colonel, who arrived from Moscow, hung a “sheet” * in front of the aviation squadron, measuring “two hundred and twenty by one hundred and eighty”, with an unfinished crew route from the take-off airfield to the point of disaster, tried to convince us that a slow depressurization had occurred at high altitude cockpit. That all crew members, in violation of the instructions, flew at high altitude with relaxed oxygen masks, and lost consciousness due to lack of oxygen and a decrease in cabin pressure. That the plane, being uncontrollable, fell into a tailspin, switched to supersonic speed, collapsed in the air, fell to the ground. Catapulted out of six crew members, only the navigator of the ship.

I listened carefully to the speech of the flight safety inspector and did not believe what I heard! So that such a mistake could be made by the commander, with whom we once deliberately carried out a five-hour cross-country flight on an aircraft with a faulty cabin pressurization system, which was always notified in the air about the well-being of the crew members?! And now I hear his voice: “Crew, pull up oxygen masks, report on how you feel!” Not! This is a lie in the name of preserving the positions of the chiefs, hiding the true cause of the death of five crew members and the loss of a combat vehicle.

Years passed. Until the day I die, the grief for the deceased friend and his crew will not leave me. He often dreams of me. He dreams of his face strained at work, his eyes intently watching the instruments, his hands, in leather gloves, not releasing the steering wheel.

All the comrades from the former regiment, with whom the flight service later brought me together, I asked about the details of this incident. Everyone agreed on one thing - the authorities hid the true cause of this disaster, but no one could know it for sure, they only expressed their assumptions.

Fellow soldiers who tried to "talk" the navigator, who was a survivor, capable of revealing the true cause of the incident, with the help of cognac and vodka, could not squeeze anything out of his mouth, sealed by the command.

When the rescue team, in the snowy mountains, on a frosty February day, took the navigator of the ship, who had landed on a parachute, from the place of the death of the crew, he did not have a headset on! To tear the headset off his head could only in one case, if he was not fastened. Consequently, the navigator in flight was not in an oxygen mask, which is attached to the headset, he breathed the cabin air, but he did not lose consciousness! Repeatedly in flights, as a ship's navigator, I had to unfasten my oxygen mask with the permission of the commander, it prevents me from leaning tightly against the rubber tube of the radar sight screen, and prevents me from seeing well the illumination from ground landmarks and targets. So being a navigator without a mask at any stage of the flight is real.

Being already retired, I told my neighbor, a retired colonel, about my disbelief in the results of the investigation of this catastrophe, with whom we were united by common hobbies for literature and, joint in the past, service. Already, ready for his imminent departure from life, struck by an oncological disease, he told me the true reason that led to the tragic death of a friend of my youth:

“You are right, Valera, that you do not recognize this false version of this catastrophe. On the plane, the engineering and technical staff installed "KPZh-30" with unacceptable residues of alcohol vapor in it! Those who carried out the cleaning of oxygen equipment, which is important for the life support of the crew in flight, did not comply with the requirements set by the instructions, installed the KPZh-30 aircraft on the aircraft without blowing it until it was completely cleared of alcohol vapors. The flight lasted 52 minutes. The crew breathed oxygen mixed with alcohol vapors in flight, and was simply poisoned! This is the second time in our Air Force that people have died because of such a violation, bordering on a crime. The first such case with the death of the crew occurred so long ago that they stopped remembering it or, as this time, they hid the true cause of the disaster in order to preserve the “skins” of the perpetrators. According to the official position I occupied in those years, I was aware of the true cause of this catastrophe. False information about the causes of that catastrophe was then brought to the majority of the flight and engineering personnel. Blame the dead so as not to destroy the families of many living - this principle has always pursued the Air Force. Until now, no one knows how many of the first cosmonauts died in space before the flight of Yuri Gagarin.

The era of digital civilization has arrived. I found everything I could find on the Internet about the effects of alcohol vapor on the human body when they were inhaled, made conclusions about how pilots could behave under the influence of alcohol that penetrated into the blood and into the human brain directly through the lungs, bypassing the stomach. The performances are terrible!

With the initial intoxication, human muscular activity is activated and the pilots could do anything, unreasonably “carrying the steering wheel”, adding and decreasing engine speed, take the plane beyond critical angles of attack and roll, beyond unacceptable flight speeds. In the future, a person drugged by alcohol vapors falls asleep and may simply die! I know two cases of people dying in the air when: one - he drank heavily on the eve of the flight as a passenger; the other took a flat bottle of cognac into the air so as not to get bored on a long flight in his single-seat suspended cabin and did not have a task for this flight in his specialty. There were even more cases of loss of consciousness in flight by those who took off “with a hangover”, having managed to “slip through” the pre-flight medical control.

For the rest of my life, I imagined myself in the place of the ship's navigator in that ill-fated flight, trying to "see" the actions of the pilots, who were poisoned against their will by alcohol vapors.

The cause of a similar air crash in the Air Force, which killed people many years before this disaster, was either hidden or forgotten. Lack of familiarity with the incident of the flight and technical crew and led to its repetition many years later. I do not remember such that when checking equipment before a flight, the instructions required to sniff the oxygen supplied to the masks from the KPZh-30. “Yes, it always smells of alcohol!”, Any flyer will say.

Traffic police officers are equipped with a device that determines the presence of alcohol in the body of drivers of vehicles, but aircraft crews do not have a device that can determine the presence of alcohol in the oxygen before departure, which they will have to breathe in flight. Maybe breathalyzers of traffic police officers are suitable for such control of the oxygen equipment of aircraft and can protect the flight crew from forced intoxication in flight ?! So why is there no such check?

Once every six months, a KPZh-30 is removed from each aircraft. Every six months they are washed with alcohol to remove dirt and fats from the system (pure oxygen can ignite when combined with fats!) Then the KPZh-30 is blown with air under a certain pressure, dried before being filled with liquid oxygen. This means that every six months you can expect a similar tragedy if the engineering staff violates the requirements for their maintenance established by the instructions.

How can you hide the truth about the true causes of disasters from people whose lives depend on their awareness?! In twenty-two years of service in aviation, I have never heard of such alcohol poisoning - through the oxygen system!

Later, I asked many colleagues if they had to deal with the fact of the presence of alcohol vapors in oxygen equipment in flight? And I heard: “We just fell out of the plane with the whole crew under the bulldozer by flying over the aircraft after it was repaired at the aircraft factory! The day before, the authorities accused aviation technicians of saving alcohol when washing KPZh-30 for the sake of washing their stomachs with it, so they left enough alcohol vapor in KPZH in order to prove that this is not so.

I also found on the Internet a skirmish between the ejected navigator of the ship and one of his colleagues, who tried to accuse the deceased commander of the ship and members of his crew of illiterate action during the depressurization of the aircraft cabin at high altitude:

The navigator to the "Prosecutor": - I would never write what I am writing now, but you have touched our crew, and there is no one else to answer. As before, I am ironic about the system for determining the best crew, but, at the time of the disaster, our crew was determined to be the best in the regiment. KK*'s mask was on and fully tightened. And he lost consciousnessfor a completely different reason before my eyes.

I was also the navigator of the innocently accused crew commander for two years, and also, joining the navigator who survived the terrible accident, I can defend him without naming him. Our deceased commander was a competent pilot, he knew aerodynamics and aircraft better than many colleagues, he was a first-class pilot who valued the lives of the people he lifted into the air. We repeatedly got into difficult situations with him in the air, from which we competently got out. Once we got away from a clear collision in the air with a huge Aeroflot airliner. Then the air traffic controllers made a mistake, bringing the sides at the point of intersection of our route with the air route at the same flight level (one flight altitude), without spreading the planes at the time of its intersection. The commander was the first to see the IL-62 approaching us and "dived" under it. I even saw the faces of the passengers clinging to the windows, we were so dangerously close.

“Killed! Killed!" - the commander's wife shouted, running to the headquarters of the regiment, having learned about the death of her husband, the father of two boys of preschool age, and four more members of his crew. How right she was when they tried to inspire her with something completely different.

* Air Force- air Force.

* KK - commander of the ship.

* "sheet" (in the Air Force)– diagram, drawing, visual tutorial, made on a Whatman sheet measuring 220 cm by 180 cm.

* "KPZh-30"– liquid oxygen is stored on the aircraft in oxygen gasifiers arranged according to the typeDewar vessels (KPZh-30, SKG-30, etc.).