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How Japan Airlines crew led 367 passengers to safety from a burning plane

reuters.com

31–40 of 65 posts

Re: How Japan Airlines crew led 367 passengers to safety from a burning plane

#31
post #5
post #3

I am inclined to think that this exact same scenario featuring a plane full of not Japanese, but, say, Dutch, English, or Americans, would not have resulted in a full evacuation in 18 minutes; possibly with casualties. Obeying commands as a group in a high-pressure situation? That takes a lifetime of living in a culture where this is normal. A group of military passengers (any nationality) would probably have worked…

Aeroflot Flight 1492 is a perfect example of this. Passengers were actively working to get carry-on bags down the emergency slide as 41 people were burning to death in the back of the plane.

These must be two extremes of cultures. Russian and Japanese must be the very opposites in almost every way.

Re: How Japan Airlines crew led 367 passengers to safety from a burning plane

#32
post #3

I am inclined to think that this exact same scenario featuring a plane full of not Japanese, but, say, Dutch, English, or Americans, would not have resulted in a full evacuation in 18 minutes; possibly with casualties. Obeying commands as a group in a high-pressure situation? That takes a lifetime of living in a culture where this is normal. A group of military passengers (any nationality) would probably have worked…

It comes to my mind the same scenario in Dubai. In the video you can see people leaving the plane with their luggage.

https://youtu.be/PyNVUXVhnAw

https://youtu.be/OvNT78ICJlg

Re: How Japan Airlines crew led 367 passengers to safety from a burning plane

#33

Seems that an overriding "lock all overhead storage" mechanism and control in the cockpit would be useful in these situations. Forced compliance would save lives. Granted some stow baggage under the seats, but I think an override would still be beneficial.

It's easy to imagine that the same person who's willing to ignore explicit instructions and clearly put others at risk, is going to be willing to spend extra time struggling to open a locked container.

This isn't going to be a "gave it a tug, didn't open, give up and move on" situation.

Re: How Japan Airlines crew led 367 passengers to safety from a burning plane

#34
post #3

I am inclined to think that this exact same scenario featuring a plane full of not Japanese, but, say, Dutch, English, or Americans, would not have resulted in a full evacuation in 18 minutes; possibly with casualties. Obeying commands as a group in a high-pressure situation? That takes a lifetime of living in a culture where this is normal. A group of military passengers (any nationality) would probably have worked…

Maybe this is a good time for me to vent about exit row seating? I was recently on a holiday flight where an older couple walked very delicately up to the gate. When prompted, "are you able and willing to assist in the event of an emergency?" the lady immediately said "oh no, we can't..." and the guy says "well, there won't be an emergency, right?" To her credit, the crew member checking us in very sternly told him t…

What, specifically, do you think requires a strong man in this case?

Airplane overwing exit doors come in two types. The ones that you fully detach and throw out, which weigh less than the average passenger's suitcase [1]. The larger and heavier ones are spring-assisted so you can literally open them with one hand while seated [2].

[1] https://youtu.be/RCFzEg-t_Bk?si=xACVKqIvakrrJnaT at 0:25

[2] https://youtu.be/ZW4xaHN1otE?si=rr0kHUzrRSXJY3Pr at 0:20

Re: How Japan Airlines crew led 367 passengers to safety from a burning plane

#35

The standard is 90 seconds, not 18 minutes = 1080 seconds. They were very lucky the fire took its time. Yes, it's necessary to shut down the engines where possible (not this case). Cabin crew waiting to confer with flight crew can waste precious seconds. In this case, we may be dealing with smoke inhalation injuries.

Yeah: I think it's 18 minutes from the plane touching down the other plane, not the plane standing still... But still: it's very, very, very long. With 3 safe exits (out of 8 apparently), and 367 passengers+crew, that's 123 passenger per exit. 18 minutes means 7 passenger per minute per exit. How the heck do you need ten seconds per passenger to hop on the slide? Even the videos from this crash show a much higher thr…

Could it be that a significant portion of the passengers were evacuated quickly, but the last few might have taken a while? I assume someone with reduced mobility/requiring a wheelchair will take a while to evacuate. And if there are more of them than flight attendants, I wouldn't be surprised if it takes that long.

Re: How Japan Airlines crew led 367 passengers to safety from a burning plane

#36
post #8
post #3

I am inclined to think that this exact same scenario featuring a plane full of not Japanese, but, say, Dutch, English, or Americans, would not have resulted in a full evacuation in 18 minutes; possibly with casualties. Obeying commands as a group in a high-pressure situation? That takes a lifetime of living in a culture where this is normal. A group of military passengers (any nationality) would probably have worked…

I think that's reductive orientalism.

I don't know. I've lived in both the Netherlands and Japan, and studied the culture (and language) of the latter. In my experience, groups of Japanese people defer to authority in the case of an emergency with a minimum of fuss, where a group of Dutch would show much more hesitation, scepticism, and sometimes outright hostility in a similar situation.

You're welcome to call that reductive occidentalism.

As a group people from those cultures behave totally differently. I'm not judging either culture with this observation (although I can be quite critical about some aspects of both); it's a simple observable fact.

Re: How Japan Airlines crew led 367 passengers to safety from a burning plane

#37

Seems that an overriding "lock all overhead storage" mechanism and control in the cockpit would be useful in these situations. Forced compliance would save lives. Granted some stow baggage under the seats, but I think an override would still be beneficial.

It's easy to imagine that the same person who's willing to ignore explicit instructions and clearly put others at risk, is going to be willing to spend extra time struggling to open a locked container. This isn't going to be a "gave it a tug, didn't open, give up and move on" situation.

I think if there is a situation when "one tug and give up" happens, this is it.

Re: How Japan Airlines crew led 367 passengers to safety from a burning plane

#38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe this is a good time for me to vent about exit row seating? I was recently on a holiday flight where an older couple walked very delicately up to the gate. When prompted, "are you able and willing to assist in the event of an emergency?" the lady immediately said "oh no, we can't..." and the guy says "well, there won't be an emergency, right?" To her credit, the crew member checking us in very sternly told him t…

What, specifically, do you think requires a strong man in this case? Airplane overwing exit doors come in two types. The ones that you fully detach and throw out, which weigh less than the average passenger's suitcase [1]. The larger and heavier ones are spring-assisted so you can literally open them with one hand while seated [2]. [1] https://youtu.be/RCFzEg-t_Bk?si=xACVKqIvakrrJnaT at 0:25 [2] https://youtu.be/ZW4x…

On the last plane I was, the door was 17kg and instructions said to pick it up, turn sideways, then throw away. I prefer strong men to do it when my life depends on it.

Re: How Japan Airlines crew led 367 passengers to safety from a burning plane

#39
post #7

Was the initial cause of the collision human error? i was on r/singularity and people were saying that pilots should be replaced with AI, but what about if something goes wrong? wouldn't it be better to have a human takeover in emergency situations? but i also wonder if automation would have prevented the initial collision.

The aviation industry doesn't usually reduce incidents down to a single proximate or ultimate cause like that, but instead notes every decision/event that contributed to the incident occurring. And then they usually spend time on how they can reduce the likelihood of such an event reoccurring at every single point in that chain. It appears that the coast guard plane lined up on the runway to prepare for takeoff instead of holding short of the runway as instructed and the JAL pilots did not see that their runway was not actually clear until it was too late to avoid a collision (if they saw the other plane at all).

From the JAL plane's perspective, automation is only as good as the sensors and logic which would be checking for if a runway is actually clear. Regardless of whether extant solutions are better than humans right now or will be better in the future, those solutions will still have a same failure mode as humans, which is suddenly realizing a runway that appeared to be clear actually isn't clear when it is too late to abort.

From the coast guard plane's perspective and from the controller perspective, automation and warnings might have been able to alert or prevent, however, automation can't just be thrown around as a solution without deep knowledge of the system and environment in which it will work. The main reason for this is ensuring that the transition between automated-control and human-control is clearly evident to the humans involved, that it occurs with enough time for the human to actually be able to avert a problem, and that the human is actually ready to take control. If the automated system silently disengages, a plane with permission to take off from a runway will instead just sit on the runway because the pilot assumes the automation will begin takeoff as expected, which brings us right back to a plane on the runway when it shouldn't be there and a landing plane not seeing it until it is too late. It is actually possible to land a plane purely with automation (military drones do it all the time), however that isn't done on commercial aircraft, because the constraints are so tight that if the automation were to fail for any reason there is a large chance the human pilot would be unable to prevent a crash even when perfectly monitoring the system (and perfect monitoring can't be assumed).

Re: How Japan Airlines crew led 367 passengers to safety from a burning plane

#40

The standard is 90 seconds, not 18 minutes = 1080 seconds. They were very lucky the fire took its time. Yes, it's necessary to shut down the engines where possible (not this case). Cabin crew waiting to confer with flight crew can waste precious seconds. In this case, we may be dealing with smoke inhalation injuries.

The idea why cabin crew shall check with the flight deck before evacuating is so that a single flight attended might not have the full picture and inadvertently open a door close to a fire or similar.

Which could severely reduce the time the airframe can withstand fire.

The idea is to gain some situational awareness and only open those doors clear of obvious risks. The flight deck has for example access to ATC which can give them additional outside information that the flight attendants don’t have.

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