How do people feel when an airplane crashes? About what the bodies of passengers can tell about the crash of the plane. The world knows more than a dozen cases of happy salvation

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.

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 the 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, sometimes conclusions can be drawn from 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 the dance hall small town or in the gym of some university: he is in a soiled lab coat, I am 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 major 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 in connection with big amount youth 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 the passengers on Flight 800 were labeled green (body intact), 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 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 exploded fuel tank in the wing. 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 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 hitting the water of a body falling from high altitude often rib fractures 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 aortic rupture.

If most of the passengers died as a result of hard hit about 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 under free fall”he cites a case where one person fell out of an airplane at an altitude 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 enough great depth dives of the wreckage of many parts of the fuselage could not be recovered, 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 Institute of Aviation Medicine of the British Royal air fleet at Farnborough under the leadership of Captain W. C. Stewart and Sir Harold E. Whittingham, Director of Medical Services of 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. internal organs, especially the lungs. It was known that such lung damage as was 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 reactions to rapid changes in atmospheric pressure, from sea level pressure to 10,000 m. 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 latest version- "extremely strong impact on the water", and as the cause of the disaster - the collapse of the hull at high altitude, possibly due to some structural defect. Because Richard Snyder wrote Fatal Injuries Resulting from Extreme Water Impact only 14 years after the events, the Farnborough team once again had to turn to guinea pigs for help. Sir Harold wanted to establish exactly what happens to the lungs when a body hits water at top speed. When I first saw animals mentioned 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 boat with their nets spread out. 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 were to be found clothed, while the passengers closer to the cockpit would be found naked or missing most clothes.

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 woolen suits and dresses, took part in the next round of the 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 of two papers that brought me closest to this topic were J. K. Earley's "Body Terminal Velocity", dated 1964, and J. S. Cotner's "Analysis of the influence 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 allow all passengers to be evacuated 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*.

* Herein lies the secret to survival similar disasters A: 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 (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 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. “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 used the stories of World War II combat aircraft pilots who had time to inflate their life jackets just before the crash. — 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 defense of the FAA, it should be said that the agency recently approved the implementation of new system, which pumps nitrogen-enriched air into the fuel tanks, which reduces the oxygen content in the fuel and, consequently, the likelihood of an explosion that led, for example, to the disaster of flight TWA 800.

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 door. emergency exit. 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 passengers sitting by the aisle more likely can be hit on the head by bags falling from the 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.

Despite the fact that thousands of times die in car accidents every year more people 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

Jugoslovenski Aerotransport (now Air Serbia) flight attendant Vesna Vulovic holds the world record for surviving a 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 in the lower part of her 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 significantly more chances cheat death in crew members and underage passengers. 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.

Original taken from

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.

A plane taking 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 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?

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 the broken and burned fragments of the crashed aircraft. 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.

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.

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 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 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 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 must analyze a large amount of information, medical experts use such a code. Specifically, the bodies of the passengers on Flight 800 were labeled green (body intact), 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.

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, and this 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.

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, 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.

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 damage as was 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 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 saw animals mentioned 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 boat with their nets spread out. 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.

* 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 (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 lead to 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. "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 used the stories of World War II combat aircraft pilots who had time to inflate their life jackets just before the crash. - 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. Shanaghan himself prefers window seats, as aisle passengers are more likely to be hit on the head by bags falling from the 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.

"No. Izvestia tracked down several people who survived plane crashes or got into serious flight accidents ...

"I somehow immediately realized that my husband was dead"

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. Returned from honeymoon trip. First we sat in the front seats. But ahead I did not like it, and we moved to the middle. 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 easy to fly on airplanes. But her son, who was born four years after the disaster, is terrified of flying.

"Consciousness instantly swam somewhere"

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. He still works in the squad of flight attendants, but already as a dispatcher. She does not even tell close friends about what she experienced.

"Someone kissed the ground, someone burst into tears of happiness..."

The group "Lyceum" is known throughout the country. But few people know that two singers from this group - Anna Pletneva and Anastasia Makarevich - also survived a fall on an airplane.

This happened five years ago, - Anna Pletneva tells Izvestia. - I was always terrified of flying by plane, but then I got braver. She flew with Nastya Makarevich to Spain. We had a great rest. In a cheerful mood, they returned to Moscow on a Boeing-767. Neighbors were with a child. The minute we started to descend and the flight attendants told us to fasten our seat belts, I had the baby in my arms. And then the plane went downhill. Things fell on his head, the flight attendants shouted: "Hold the children! Get down!" I realized that we were falling, and pressed the baby to me. In my head flashed: "Is this all?" I used to think that when it was so scary, my heart should be beating wildly. But you don't really feel the heart. You don’t feel yourself, but you look at everything as if from the outside. The worst thing is hopelessness. You can't influence anything. But there was no panic - the one that is shown in the movies. Grave silence. Everyone, as if in a dream, buckled up and froze. Someone prayed, someone said goodbye to relatives.

Anna does not remember how much time has passed. Maybe seconds... Or minutes.

Suddenly, the plane gradually began to level off, - she recalls, - I looked around: did it really only seem to me? But no, others also started up ... Even when we stopped on the runway, we could not believe that everything ended well. The commander announced: "Congratulations to everyone! We were born in a shirt. Now everything will be fine in your life."

Surprisingly, I have ceased to be afraid to fly on airplanes, she says. - And on charter flights pilots often let us into the cockpit and let us steer. I like it so much that I want to buy my own small plane soon. We will fly it on tour.

"I really wanted to rewind the tape"

Our colleague, Izvestia journalist Georgy Stepanov, also survived the fall.

It happened in the summer of 1984,” he recalls. - I flew on a Yak-40 plane from Batumi to Tbilisi. When I got on the plane, there was a feeling that I was in a gypsy camp - there were so many things there. They were clogged with all the compartments from above, as well as the passage of the cabin. Don't push through. Passengers, of course, were also more than expected. We took off and gained altitude. Below the sea. Pulled into slumber. But then the fuselage seemed to have been hit with a sledgehammer, the rumble of the turbine became different, and the plane abruptly, almost vertically, went down. Everyone who was not fastened flew off their seats and rolled around the cabin interspersed with things. Screams, screams. A terrible panic began. I was strapped in. I still remember my state of horror. Everything in me broke off, my body seemed to be stiff. The feeling was that everything was not happening to me, but I was somewhere on the side. The only thing I thought: poor parents, what will happen to them? I couldn't scream or move. Nearby everyone was completely white with fear. Their dead, motionless eyes were striking, as if they were already in another world.

We actually fell for no more than a minute. The plane leveled off: passengers began to come to their senses, pick up things. Then, when we were already flying up to Tbilisi, the pilot got out of the cockpit. He was like a zombie. We began to ask: what happened? In response, he wanted to laugh it off, but somehow it was a pity he did it, it became embarrassing for him.

This fall still haunts me. When I get on a plane, I feel like a completely helpless creature in an unreliable shell.

The world knows more than a dozen cases of happy salvation

No matter how many specialists, referring to statistics, assure us that air transport is the safest, many are afraid to fly. The earth leaves hope, the height does not. How did those who did not survive the plane crash feel? We will never know this. According to research by 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.

The ancient Greek poet Theognid wrote: "What is not destined by fate will not happen, but what is destined - I am not afraid of that." There are also cases miraculous salvation. Larisa Savitskaya is not the only one who survived the plane crash. In 1944, the English pilot Stephen, shot down by the Germans, fell from a height of 5500 meters and survived. In 2003, a Boeing 737 crashed in Sudan. survived two year old, although the aircraft was almost completely burned out. The world knows more than a dozen such cases.

An-148 aircraft flying from Domodedovo to the city of Orsk Orenburg region. 71 people - 65 passengers and 6 crew members - were killed. February 12 became a day of mourning in the Orenburg region.

Every time such a tragedy occurs, many think about what a person experiences at the time of death. Does he realize that he is dying? Does he feel pain? Is it aware of the irreparability of what happened, or, on the contrary, does the psyche strive to deceive a person to the end?

Answers to terrible questions were given by experts. According to one of them, Sergei Savelyev, head of the laboratory for the development of the nervous system at the Research Institute of Human Morphology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, a lot depends on the reasons that caused the plane to crash. If this is an explosion, then with a high degree of probability it can be argued that the victim of a plane crash will not have time to feel pain. Because impulses through the human nervous system pass much more slowly than an explosion occurs. Death will literally come instantly, and the brain simply will not have time to realize what happened.

The situation is different if the plane loses control and falls down. There is time to think, but even in such a seemingly hopeless situation, a person does not lose faith in a successful outcome.

Sergei Savelyev, Head of the Laboratory for the Development of the Nervous System, Research Institute of Human Morphology, Russian Academy of Sciences:

A person always hopes that he will get out and stay alive. It resists to the last, while the brain is alive. And he dies last. This is due to our blood supply system.

However, the most terrible fate awaits a person when the cabin is depressurized, said Eduard Tumanov, a doctor, forensic expert, candidate of medical sciences. If the aircraft loses its tightness at high altitude, then the air immediately leaves the cabin of the airliner. The pressure drops rapidly, and the gases present in the human blood abruptly change from a liquid state to a gaseous state. No matter how terrible it may sound, but the blood simply boils.

Eduard Tumanov, doctor, forensic expert, candidate of medical sciences:

Approximately the same effect occurs when we open a bottle of mineral water. Lots of air bubbles come out. And in a bottle of mineral water, the pressure is about 2 atmospheres. The difference is only 2 times - and how many bubbles. There is a difference of about 4 times. You can imagine what is happening in the entire human circulatory system.

All this in medicine is called explosive decompression. It is clear that in such a state a person is not able to use oxygen mask, as it is recommended to him to do at the beginning of the flight by the stewardess.

Of course, many people know cases when people survived in plane crashes. And not only when the plane took off or landed, but also fell from a great height. Therefore, there is a chance to stay alive, and you can increase the likelihood of a successful outcome by following a number of rules. First of all, if you have a choice on which airliner to fly, choose the largest model possible. - they absorb when they hit the ground the largest number kinetic energy. An important factor is the place that you will take in the liner. Research says it's safest to be close to an emergency exit.

3 minutes after takeoff and 8 before landing. According to statistics, it is during these 11 minutes, during takeoff and landing, that about 80% of air crashes occur. At this time, it is not recommended to fall asleep; the fact that you should not take alcohol before the flight is implied from the very beginning. Both that and another will reduce concentration of attention and will break coordination of movements.

When emergency situation take the right posture and keep your cool. If there is a seat in front of you, then you should clasp it with your hands and press your head against the back. If not, then you need to wrap your hands around your head, pressed to your knees. Do not panic and keep your cool - a sober mind will help you make the right decision. After all, the chance of being in a plane crash is very small, and modern airliners are, for the most part, extremely reliable.