Crashing, Burning Planes Don’t Stop Passengers From Grabbing Their Luggage

Ever considered taking your bags in an emergency despite those instructions to leave them behind? You’re not the only one.

If your flight has an emergency and you’re told to evacuate, be certain that at least two things will happen. You’ll experience the adrenaline rush of a lifetime, for one. But you’ll also hear the urgent commands of flight attendants telling you to leave your bags behind. Yes, all of them. Laptops and purses, too.

Maybe the adrenaline is causing temporary deafness. Materialism has been winning out over self-preservation as air travelers often ignore the order to drop everything, a fact illustrated in recent years by laden passengers fleeing a burning 777 in San Francisco or a Delta Air Lines Inc. jet that skidded off a snowy New York runway. The latest example came on Wednesday, when an Emirates Airline flight crashed on landing in Dubai, followed by a severe fire that consumed much of the Boeing 777-300. Video showed some travelers collecting luggage before they escaped. All 282 passengers and 18 crew survived, but an airport firefighter died while battling the blaze.

This Is How 300 People Escaped a Fiery Crash Landing in Dubai

Lessons learned from past tragedies have made modern aircraft much safer. The Emirates disaster is a prime example.


An Emirates jumbo jet crash lands in Dubai, suffers an apparent engine explosion, and loses most of its top section to fire. The plane comes to rest looking as though someone used a giant, flame-throwing can opener to rip off the length of the cabin.

Despite this tremendous mechanical violence, all 300 people aboard escaped with their lives. How did this happen?

The short answer is engineering and training.

The incident involving Flight 521, a Boeing Co. 777-300 on a flight from India, resembled the July 2013 crash landing of an Asiana Boeing 777-200 in San Francisco, which clipped a seawall, flipped, and then burned near a runway. Only three of the 291 passengers on that flight died—a 99 percent survival rate—while the jet was destroyed.

When Aircraft Crash And Pilot Mistakes

One of the most disturbing statistics about general aviation accidents is that more than 75% of them are made because of pilot error. Considering that it’s unlikely that pilots are going away anytime soon, the solution comes in the form of prevention. Saying this is easy, but actually making progress toward this goal is rather problematic. The first step toward eliminating pilot error is to examine the enemy. Just what types of errors are pilots committing and why? Then, armed with this information, pilots can make a concerted effort to avoid such mistakes through a fusion of training, planning and keen attention.

1 Weather. The more a pilot knows about it, the better. While thunderstorms, icing and winds claim their share of airplanes, the real weather gadfly are those serene, innocent-looking clouds and their cousin, fog. Clouds and fog aren’t inherently dangerous; it’s just that when pilots fly into them, they don’t know how to fly on instruments. They fly into a cloud, lose control and crash. Accident gurus call this flying “VFR into IFR.” Well over 80% of such accidents are fatal.

Even though these accidents are referred to as “inadvertent flight into instrument meteorological conditions (IMC),” only 24% of them are inadvertent. The remaining cases show pilots who continue into poor weather. Why is this? Overconfidence is one. Some believe that they don’t need to stay current or that their hour under the hood is good enough. Social pressure also plays a role. Passengers want to get there and pressure the pilot to continue. Last, there’s “get-there-itis.” Pilots are mission-oriented, sometimes too much so.

2 CFIT. Another common pilot error that often involves weather is controlled flight into terrain (CFIT). A simplified definition of CFIT is “flying a perfectly good airplane into the ground.” If a pilot is in a cloud or in fog, he or she can’t see the ground. If the pilot isn’t doing a good job of keeping up with the terrain, an unpleasant meeting with the ground is more likely. Another time when CFIT can be a factor independent of weather is at night. Pilots seem to have a knack of flying into trees and hills after the sun goes down. Again, if pilots allow themselves to be lulled into neglecting to constantly compare their present altitude to that of surrounding terrain, the outcome is likely to be nasty. If you can’t see the terrain, you must be able to point to your position on a sectional, en route chart, approach plate, etc., or you shouldn’t be flying.

35 INCIDENTS OF NEAR MISS BETWEEN JAN'15 AND MAR'16: GOVT

A total of 35 'near-miss' incidents involving aircraft of various airlines have been reported in Indian airspace between January 2015 and March this year, Lok Sabha was informed today.

In a written reply, Minister of State for Civil Aviation Mahesh Sharma said that in the last one year and including the current year, the number of air-miss incidents stand at 35.

While last year a total of 25 such cases were reported, this year the number of near-miss incidents stand at 10 till the end of March, he said.

He also said that there was a report of receiving traffic advisory by an IndiGo flight due to overshooting the assigned level on Jammu-Srinagar in December last year.

After 70 years, US brings home remains of downed World War II airmen from India

NEW DELHI: Excavated remains of soldiers, including fragments of bones, and artifacts of a US Air Force B-24 bomber and a C-109 aircraft that had crashed in present-day Arunachal Pradesh during the World War II were today sent off to the US.

US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter, who was here on a three-day visit, oversaw the repatriation ceremony at the airport here.

One set of remains was recovered in Arunachal Pradesh between September 12 and November 17, 2015. Another set of remains was handed over to Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) by a third party from the same region.

The remains recovered late last year are possibly associated with a B-24 bomber aircraft crash on January 25, 1944, where a crew of eight personnel assigned to the 14th Air Force, 308th Bomb Group were lost during a routine mission from Kunming, China to Chabua, India.

Air Force's 86th Aircraft Crashes. Parliamentary Committee Says the Average is One Aircraft a Month.

NEW DELHI: A Jaguar fighter - a twin-engine, single seater strike aircraft of Anglo-French origin - of the Indian Air Force crashed this morning near Allahabad in Uttar Pradesh.
It was the 86th crash since 2007 -- on an average, the Indian Air Force (IAF) has lost about one aircraft every month for the past eight years.

17/06/15 Anindita sanyal/NDTV

8 ACCIDENTS AND INCIDENTS INVOLVING AIRBUS A320

Here is a list of all the accidents and incidents involving the Airbus A320 type aircraft;

1) On 26 June 1988, Air France Flight 296, using a recently introduced and just months-old Airbus A320-111, crashed into the tops of trees beyond the runway on a demonstration flight at Mulhouse-Habsheim Airport, France. Three passengers (of 136 on board) were killed.

2) On 14 February 1990, Indian Airlines Flight 605, using an Airbus A320-231, carrying 146 people, crashed on its final approach to the HAL Airport, Bangalore. 88 passengers and four crew members were killed.]

3) On 20 January 1992, Air Inter Flight 148, using an Airbus A320-111, crashed into a high ridge near Mount Sainte-Odile in the Vosges mountains while on final approach to Strasbourg at the end of a scheduled flight from Lyon. This accident resulted in the deaths of 87 of the aircraft's occupants (six crew members, 90 passengers).

4) On 14 September 1993, Lufthansa Flight 2904, using an Airbus A320-211, coming from Frankfurt am Main with 70 people, crashed into an earth wall at the end of the runway at Warsaw. A fire started in the left wing area and penetrated into the passenger cabin. The training captain and a passenger died.

5) On 22 March 1998, Philippine Airlines Flight 137, using an Airbus A320-214, crashed and overran the runway of Bacolod City Domestic Airport, RPVB, in Bacolod, Philippines, plowing through homes near it. None of the passengers or crew died, but many were injured and three on the ground were killed.

PILOTS WERE SLEEPING WHEN AIR FRANCE FLIGHT CRASHED: REPORT

Two out of three pilots were sleeping minutes before the Air France plane plunged into the sea off Brazil in 2009, with the loss of all 228 people on board, media reported on Monday.

Horrific details of the last moments of Flight 447 have emerged in a disturbing new investigation into the 2009 disaster involving an Airbus 330, Daily Mail online reported.

Recorded conversations between 37-year-old David Robert, Pierre-Cedric Bonin, 32, and Marc Dubois, the 58-year-old captain of the plane, reveal that two of them were asleep when the plane got into difficulty in a tropical storm, said the report.