|
Thanks for watching our internet edition of Nightline, I'm Terry Moran.
The increasingly crowded skies present new safety worries every week for air travelers. On Friday, a government study revealed that more than half of US commercial airports don't have an adequate safety margin at the end of a runway. There were three runway mishaps in the last week alone. But too many people think being involved in a plane crash spells certain doom. Most crashes are actually quite survivable, believe it or not. Now one expert has spelt out what it takes to get out alive. Here is ABC's Nick Watt.
Thank you very much.
20 C , just straight down, sir.
Hello, can I check your boarding pass?
Thank you.
You have a, a metal tube, you cram it full of people, you put limited exits in it so it's difficult to get out. You then, wrap the whole thing with kerosene, fuel, and then you hurl it down the runway at 150 miles an hour.
That's intrinsically a dangerous environment. Take flight 358 from Paris that touched down in Toronto one stormy afternoon in August last year. 309 people were on board the Air France jet which overshot the runway, slammed into a ravine and burst into flames. A passenger's nightmare.
Why bother watching this report? Why bother listening to the in-flight safety demonstration? I normally just do the crossword or flip through the in-flight magazine. I mean, surely if the plane crashes, we are all dead, right?
Wrong. All 309 people on board that flight from Paris to Toronto survived. It became known as the Toronto Miracle. But surviving an air crash is not a miracle. In fact, between 1983 and 2000 more than 95% of people involved in plane crashes in the US survived. So is there anything you can do to avoid being part of that fatal 5%?
Well this plane fire on the tarmac of an English Airport in 1985 set one man on the path to find out. There was no crash, no fatal impact but an engine fire killed nearly half the passengers on board.
Why did 55 people die, why could 55 people not escape?
Professor Ed Galea has pored over interviews with 2000 survivors of 105 plane crashes, analyzing their behavior, creating computer simulations of that behavior and searching for the keys to survival.
We saw flames, it was just totally orange out the window, we couldn't see where we were going and people started panicking, err, we, everyone jumped out of their seat, their seats.
Lauren like 50% of airline passengers was traveling in a group.
If you're traveling in a family group, you should insist that the airline does not separate you err, through the aircraft. You should be seated together. Why? Well it's only natural that if you're involved in that sort of situation, you're gonna want to, reunite the group before you evacuate. Now if you do that, that's going to cause havoc.
Sit together but be prepared to split apart in a smoke filled cabin.
Perhaps you have one adult is responsible for a particular child and the other adult is responsible for the other child, so now you have, essentially two groups of two people. And the groups should be, err, prepared to evacuate through different exits if necessary, and so, each child should know, you know, which parent is, is gonna be looking after them in that, in that situation.
Mind goes almost into autopilot, and so when you go to release the seat belt, you're not really thinking about that, and, and what's your most, common experience undoing a seat belt? It's in your car. And how do you undo the seat belt in your car? You press a button.
Of course on a plane, you lift a latch rather than pushing a button. Even pilots traveling back here as passengers, have been known to get that wrong.
Oh...
Ten years ago, the pilot of this hijacked Ethiopian airliner ran out of fuel and ditched in the Indian Ocean.
About 5 minutes before we crashed, we came on with the first of two announcements, saying that we're gonna have to ditch, to get ready to ditch. And you are for a water landing, you know, to have everything ready, not, not to inflate, but have on the life vests.
In the panic, not everyone listened. 123 were killed. Many of them drowned, trapped inside the fuselage....
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
mishap:a minor mistake or accident 小灾祸
spell:to show that something is going to happen, usually something bad 预示
kerosene:a clean oil with a strong sell that is used for fuel 煤油
intrinsic:relating to the essential qualities or features of something or someone 内在的 本质的
ravine:a very deep narrow vally with steep sides 沟壑
tarmac:the part of an airport where the planes stop and people walk across to get on a plane 停机坪
pore over:注视
|