Comment by deadbabe
On the positive side, if they had made a crash landing with so little fuel, there would not likely have been a fiery explosion, and many more passengers would have survived than normal?
On the positive side, if they had made a crash landing with so little fuel, there would not likely have been a fiery explosion, and many more passengers would have survived than normal?
Dunno about "only" ... 99.99998% of flights kill 0% of their passengers. Even if "just" one passenger dies in an incident, your flight is already in the 0.00002th percentile for safety, very bad!
Yes, even though that is a harsh conclusion to make and for the families involved of course it doesn't matter at all. But as these come this was bad but still not nearly as bad as it could have been. They were about to cross one of the busiest highways in NL, another 100 meters and it would have been an entirely different story. The field they landed in is in the Haarlemmermeerpolder, so clay and it had just been plowed.
that was equipment failure crew had to fight it, not something predictable like running out of fuel
> and many more passengers would have survived than normal?
This[1] kind of crash landing is very rare (in that case there was no fire despite being immediately after take off, perhaps because of the cold). Normally an outcome like this is only reasonable to expect if you actually reach a runway despite being out of fuel. Like Gimli[2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scandinavian_Airlines_System_F...
Well there'd probably be a fire but not a sustained fire which would improve survivability.
Air + fuel explodes just fine. You really don't want to crash an airliner. At landing speed the number of people dead will still be > 0 and the remainder has a good chance of being injured seriously.
For instance:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_Airlines_Flight_1951
This happened at landing speed (the airport is only a few hundred meters from the crash site) and the plane was at the end of its flight from Turkey, it did not catch fire. Still, 9 people perished and the remainder were all but one injured 11 of them seriously.