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Asiana Airlines Boeing 777 crashes at SFO

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131–140 of 275 posts

Re: Asiana Airlines Boeing 777 crashes at SFO

#131
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously. If you are ever posed with a situation where you must evacuate an aircraft, then GTFO and just leave your bags onboard. Do not do anything that could impede others' egress. You can get new stuff later, and the airline is likely to compensate you anyway (case in point, within days after US Air 1549 landed in the Hudson, the airline cut checks to the passengers to compensate for irretrievable belongings). Yo…

We don't know (yet) what happened. It could be that the passengers were standing around for a minute or two before being able to exit the plane. In the meantime, you're probably not hurting anything by reaching up into the overhead or under your feet and grabbing your bag.

You are, you can't fit as many people in the aisle that way.

Re: Asiana Airlines Boeing 777 crashes at SFO

#132
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bottlenecks in their escape were the doorway and the crew's deployment of the inflatable slide. Rushing the door in a panic would have done nobody any good. In a situation like that, why wouldn't you grab your bag if it was readily accessible? It seems like healthy, rational behavior rather than a symptom of extreme confusion.

> Rushing the door in a panic would have done nobody any good. No one's suggesting this. You can both leave the plane in a calm manner and leave your bags behind. As far as I'm concerned, there's no good reason to take your bag unless it's actively obstructing the way out -- which, in fairness, could well be what's happened here. Off-hand, some reasons not to: the aisles have limited capacity, and more bags in the ai…

> Off-hand, some reasons not to: the aisles have limited capacity, and more bags in the aisles mean fewer people can be queueing ready to get off.

I can see what you're saying but "number of people queued in the aisles" isn't an important measurement at all. The important thing would how much the overall rate of passage through the exits is affected by the people who grabbed their bags.

I expect the rate of passage through those exits has a lot to do with what people do when they reach the bottom of the slide. That certainly might be affected by what they're carrying, but then again, people might have simply been tossing their bags over the side. You can't rely too heavily on a single photograph to analyse these things.

> I think people have taken the "keep calm" message to heart and, if anything, need to be taught to treat this kind of thing more seriously.

The alternatives are to keep calm or panic. I guess "seriousness" is subjective but when it comes to calmness vs. panic, I know which alternative I'd prefer the people around me to exhibit in an emergency. Particularly in a confined space. How is this even an argument?

Re: Asiana Airlines Boeing 777 crashes at SFO

#134
I know this is exciting news and all, but:

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Hacker News Guidelines

What to Submit On-Topic:

Anything that good hackers would find interesting.

That includes more than hacking and startups.

If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Off-Topic:

Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.

Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures.

If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

I'd say trying to rationalize that this story is relevant on HN by saying "startups use SFO" is a stretch. I'd hope that people taking flights out actually check with the airport first before checking HN.

Re: Asiana Airlines Boeing 777 crashes at SFO

#136
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't imagine the confusion that must have gone on when that happened, maybe it's shock or maybe people just underestimate the severity of their situation but correct me if I'm wrong... are there people in that photo actually carrying their bags off the plane? I can't quite comprehend that.

Apparently, it is fairly normal behavior; people activate a "leave plane" program. Having only one, they pick the one involving grabbing one's luggage before getting out of the plane. (Sorry, can't find a reference. Most hits I get are either on emergency reaction/response by outside teams or on long-term emergency responses such as PTSD, community reactions, etc)

I remember seeing a car accident once, a young guy in a mustang T-Boned a mini-van driven by a mother with an infant passenger. A moment after the accident, the woman got out of the minivan, walked around to the other side to open the working side door, grabbed her purse, and then calmly walked to the shoulder to wait for police. It was only after anybody asked her if there was anybody else in the vehicle that she realized her infant was still in the van, right next to where her purse had been. She ran over, retrieved her child and then went back to the curb, cursing herself the entire way.

(everybody was fine, there were no injuries).

Re: Asiana Airlines Boeing 777 crashes at SFO

#137
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't imagine the confusion that must have gone on when that happened, maybe it's shock or maybe people just underestimate the severity of their situation but correct me if I'm wrong... are there people in that photo actually carrying their bags off the plane? I can't quite comprehend that.

The bottlenecks in their escape were the doorway and the crew's deployment of the inflatable slide. Rushing the door in a panic would have done nobody any good. In a situation like that, why wouldn't you grab your bag if it was readily accessible? It seems like healthy, rational behavior rather than a symptom of extreme confusion.

Also, since it's an international flight, people's travel papers are likely in their backpacks, etc. If you take the time to grab your backpack, you may as well grab whatever else before you head out.

Re: Asiana Airlines Boeing 777 crashes at SFO

#139
post #57
post #8

Why is this HN relevant ?

You've been downvoted, but I think your question is a right one. Is this relevant, because it happened in San Francisco? Is every incident or crash in San Francisco relevant, then? Does it satisfy our intellectual curiosity? Is there something we can learn from it? Is there a clever hack involved? An interesting trend emerging? Obviously 128 people (what a nice number) think this should be on the HN front page. I don…

In my humble opinion, I consider it to be a bigger story than Vim 7.4a being ready for beta testing.

Re: Asiana Airlines Boeing 777 crashes at SFO

#140

Ugh...my wife is deathly afraid of flying. She is in Canada now and flying back to SFO next week. I hope she doesn't hear about this.

Point out that the fact that this is newsworthy underscores how rare of an occurrence it is.

My friend with flight anxiety actually got it from researching airplane safety. While they did learn about probabilities n'all, they also learned about way too many details, after which every single sound seems like the oscillating electron pump failure on Molvania flight 52317 where nobody survived the spontaneous atmosphere exit. It's not exactly rational, it's your silly brain suddenly deciding the specific probability of gruesome death went from epsilon to 99%, and anxiety going through the roof.

Solution: sleeping pills, apparently, or generally anti-anxiety and good contact with flight staff (thus ability to find "safe feeling" seats). In the specific case.

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