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TOP STORY
On Sunday, a packed Delta flight flipped onto its back immediately upon landing at Toronto Pearson airport. Video of the crash shows that it took only two seconds from passengers thinking everything was fine to being violently pitched upside-down. And yet, there were no deaths and almost everyone aboard walked away.
This almost certainly would not have happened in prior decades. The technology and safety protocols of just 25 years ago most likely would have yielded multiple deaths, if not a mass-fatality incident.
It is said that every safety regulation is written in blood. The structure of modern air traffic control was conceived after a 1956 mid-air collision between two airliners over the Grand Canyon. The “checklist” became a standard feature of aviation after a deadly 1935 crash in which pilots had forgotten to release a simple safety lock. Commercial pilots must know how to speak English after a series of airport misunderstandings led to the deaths of 583 people in the 1977 Tenerife Air Disaster.
Below, a cursory look at the oceans of blood that had to be spilled to yield a miracle like Sunday’s crash at Toronto Pearson.
Seat belts prevented the fuselage from becoming a mess of twisted bodies
The singular hero of Sunday’s crash was the seat belts. It’s been mandatory since the 1970s for air passengers to be belted in during takeoff and landing — but it took thousands of preventable fatalities to get there. As early as the 1920s, a lack of seatbelts was killing people in air crashes; a U.S. Navy sea plane crashed in 1927 after turbulence threw the unbelted pilot from his seat.
But it would be decades until seatbelts would be freed from the widespread misconception that they mostly served to trap survivors inside crashed aircraft, or caused death themselves via internal injuries to wearers. It would take countless autopsies and avoidable fatalities until there was enough data for perceptions would shift.
Tray tables were in their upright and locked position
One of the more annoying routines of commercial air travel almost certainly prevented serious injury in the Delta crash. The flight’s passengers — like every airline passenger — had been told to stow their tray tables and take their seats out of the recline position.
The main reason for the rule is egress: It’s difficult to evacuate a plane amid reclined seats and swinging tray tables. The science underlying modern egress models is based on some very gruesome data: Bodies piled up around doors that won’t open, passengers trapped or maimed by flying debris. A 2015 FAA study using crash test dummies also found any number of ghastly injuries that could be caused by a flailing passenger in front of an unsecured tray table.
Seats were bolted down, and built to withstand a violent rollover
Hugh DeHaven is considered the father of “crashworthiness”; the science of designing vehicles so that they “package” their passengers to better survive a collision.
DeHaven was a U.S. citizen, but he had joined the Royal Canadian Flying Corps during the First World War. Almost immediately, he became the only survivor of a 1917 training crash, and it would end up inspiring a lifelong fascination with the precise factors that cause people to die — or not die — in air incidents.
One of DeHaven’s many legacies is the idea of aircraft seats that can absorb the energy of a crash and protect the occupant.
Everyone in the Delta crash was sitting in a seat that was not only firmly bolted to the floor, but rated to survive up to 16 Gs of force without breaking; such seats have been mandatory on new U.S.-registered aircraft since 1988. As per a 2000 analysis by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, “16-g seats” are most useful at preventing death or injury in the conditions that roughly describe the Delta crash: A cabin-load of passengers being violently jerked around at high speed.
The aircraft wasn’t consumed by flames
A commercial aircraft is essentially a thin aluminum tube packed with thousands of litres of flammable liquid. When fully fueled, the CRJ 900 that crashed in Toronto carries about 27 bathtubs’ worth of aviation fuel. It takes an awful lot of technology to ensure that such a thing can pinwheel down an airport runway without being consumed by fire (the Delta flight did catch fire, but flames were quickly extinguished).
There are two major crashes with Canadian connections that helped write modern fire regulations on commercial aircraft. The first is Swissair Flight 111, which plummeted into the sea off Nova Scotia in 1998. Only after painstakingly reassembling the shattered plane did Canadian investigators conclude that the cause was a fire started by the aircraft’s in-flight entertainment system.
The second is a 1983 Air Canada Flight 797 incident that killed Canadian folk singer Stan Rogers. This was also caused by an onboard fire that caused flames to roar through the cabin soon after landing; Rogers was among 23 trapped in the burning plane.
Both incidents led to new rules on “fire hardening” of commercial aircraft: Better wiring, better fire detection, more fire resistant materials, automatic fire extinguishers, emergency lighting powerful enough to cut through smoke and egress protocols to ensure a plane could be evacuated within 90 seconds (the exact time it took for Air Canada Flight 797 to be consumed by flames). That last protocol, in particular, would be fulfilled almost perfectly in the Delta crash.
Delta crew knew exactly how to clear out a planeload of dazed passengers
One commonality in survivor accounts from the Delta crash is the repeated shouting of simple commands from the cabin crew. One of them, captured in a passenger recording is, “drop everything! Drop it, come on.”
If the crash had occurred as recently as the 1990s, passengers might have instead heard nothing; crew would be delivering instructions through a public address system that wasn’t working. Or, survivors might have heard only a chaotic hubbub pinpointed by the occasional “this way!” from an alert passenger.
A 1995 study by the Transportation Safety Board of Canada found multiple incidents in which a survivable air crash was made far more dangerous by a lack of effective communication to passengers.
In the 2000s, airlines began to codify short, sharp instructions (“unfasten seat belt! Fit lifejacket!”) as the most effective means of getting people out of a plane.
“Operators have in the past allowed cabin crew to improvise commands,” reads a 2021 guidance by Australia’s Civil Aviation Safety Authority. It adds, “improvisation may be allowed but should be supported by thorough training in commands and procedures to use as a fall-back mechanism.”
IN OTHER NEWS
As if we don’t have enough problems with the Americans, the following headline was placed atop a U.S. Department of Justice press release last week: Canadian Citizen Charged With Aerial Photography Of Defense Installation. Xiao Guang Pan, 71, of Brampton, used a January vacation to Florida to take drone photos of Cape Canaveral, the site of all major U.S. space launches. But it’s also a military base, so he could end up going to jail for three years on espionage charges.
Liberal leadership frontrunner Mark Carney doesn’t really have any political training, which is why he’ll occasionally say things that are virtually tailor-made to be packaged into an attack ad by opponents. The latest example came via Carney’s appearance on The Rest is Politics, one of a series of hits on non-Canadian media he’s done in recent weeks. “People will charge me as being elitist or, you know, a globalist … but that happens to be exactly what we need,” he said.
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