What exactly do passengers killed in plane crashes die of?

October 20, 2009 3:45 AM

What exactly do passengers killed in plane crashes die of? And has anyone recorded it in a comprehensive way?

It must be different in every crash. Blunt trauma, fire, smoke, loss of air pressure, blood loss, even drowning.

Are there any records of this out there, either broken down by crash in a general way or broken down by passenger in each crash?

posted by Ashley801 to Grab Bag (10 answers total)

Here's some detail about the experience passengers of Korean Air Lines Flight 007 likely suffered after their plane was shot down by a Soviet missile.
posted by Zarkonnen at 4:06 AM on October 20, 2009

And the relevant section for the Lockerbie bombing.

(I morbidly wikicomaed about those two a while ago. Planes obviously crash from other causes too, but I remembered that those two articles both had sections about what happened to the passengers.)
posted by Zarkonnen at 4:10 AM on October 20, 2009

I remember reading about the typical scenario: most passengers sustain some kind of non-life-threatening injury, such as broken leg(s), and are unable to escape from the burning fuselage. Therefore, they die from fire and/or smoke inhalation, because they're trapped by injuries, other passengers, panic, etc.

I don't have the original story to cite, but Googling turned up this, which seems to agree:

A US government study found there were 568 plane crashes in the US between 1993 and 2000, involving a total of 53,487 passengers and crew. Of these, 51,207 – or over 90 per cent survived. Even on the 26 crashes deemed the worst, the study found that more than half the passengers and crew survived.

... More to the point, the study found that a third of those who died – smoke and fire accounted for most deaths – would almost certainly have survived if they'd taken certain precautions. (source)

posted by knave at 4:42 AM on October 20, 2009 [3 favorites]

Best answer: Ok, this is ridiculous. Here's a link to the aforementioned NTSB study: Survivability of Accidents Involving Part 121 U.S. Air Carrier Operations, 1983 Through 2000. [PDF]

The findings, at the end of the PDF, state that impact forces killed two or five times as many passengers as fire-related, depending on the category rating of the crash. So, this basically contradicts the quote in my response above. Also, the article even got the year range of the study wrong.
posted by knave at 4:58 AM on October 20, 2009

Yes, there are books and databases that track this (in the US, I think the most comprehensive database is kept by the NTSB). Of interest might be the book "Aerospace Pathology" or articles like "Human Factors in Aerospace Pathology".

There are forensic pathologists who specialize in aviation accidents and it is their job to try and determine, from the remains of the plane and passengers, what happened in the crash. Mary Roach's book, "Stiff", covers this in her chapter, "Beyond the Black Box: When the bodies of the passengers must tell the story of a crash".
posted by jeanmari at 5:10 AM on October 20, 2009

Swissair Flight 111 (1998): "The initial focus of the recovery was on finding and identifying human remains, and on recovering the flight recorders, but this proved difficult as the force of impact was "in the order of at least 350 g", and the environmental conditions only allowed recovery along with wreckage. Only one of the victims was visually identifiable. 147 were identified by fingerprint, dental records, and X-ray comparisons. The remaining 81 were identified through DNA tests."
Mostly only very small pieces of people were found, alas.
posted by fish tick at 5:53 AM on October 20, 2009

Vesna Vulovic survived a fall from a plane which blew apart (there's controversy, now, over the height from which she fell), as did Takehiko Nakano, although he later died of internal injuries. The chapter in Stiff, mentioned by jeanmari is morbidly fascinating (actually the whole book is good).
posted by crush-onastick at 6:28 AM on October 20, 2009

That Vesna Vulovic incident reminds me of the opening chapter of "The Satanic Verses".
posted by hwestiii at 7:11 AM on October 20, 2009

There is a whole chapter about this in Mary Roach's Stiff (which is a fascinating read in general).
posted by radioamy at 9:04 AM on October 20, 2009

On one of those crash test shows on Discovery Channel they crash tested some planes in a simulated too fast landing. The crash test dummies showed that pretty much all of the passengers would have died or at least been incapacitated by the impact, while the pilots would have been OK due to the better vertical impact absorbing pilot chairs.
posted by Iax at 1:41 PM on October 20, 2009