Plane crash survival: miracle or skill and science?

On August 2, 2005, amid heavy rain and lightning, Air France Flight 358 from Paris, France, to Toronto, Canada, crashed. The plane touched down, and the passengers cheered, forgetting that just because the airplane's wheels hit the tarmac does not mean the flight is over. The plane struggled to slow down but failed, overshooting the runway by 200 yards and eventually slamming into a ravine. Flames emerged from the aircraft body as the twelve crew members evacuated the 297 passengers.

Most of the passengers were out of the plane in less than a minute, many of them taking time to grab their belongings and taking photographs of dazed fellow passengers and the smoldering wreckage (these would later be sold to evening news programs). The copilot searched the plane for any remaining passengers before exiting. When the smoke cleared and the passengers were counted, every single person was found to have made it out alive.

Canada's transportation minister, Jean Lapierre, proclaimed that the 100 percent survival rate was "nothing short of a miracle." Passengers, pundits, and the news media quickly adopted the "miracle" tag, with hundreds of headlines touting the miraculous nature of the crash. London's Daily Mail, for example, called it "The Miracle of Toronto" while Reuters called it "The Toronto Miracle Crash." Toronto Sun columnist Mike Strobel wrote a piece lamenting the news media's overuse of the word miracle. "In the news game, we use it to death," he wrote. "Our [Toronto Sun] clipping file lists the word 240 times this year alone and 239 times, it did not fit. Except today. Miracle Flight 358. Paris to Pearson. We all saw that awful black smoke. A funeral pyre, surely.... No one gets out of that alive."

The "miracle" label was perfect. It was a great news handle and a great silver lining in a dark storm cloud. However, it doesn't fit the circumstances of Flight 358. Aviation experts said that while the outcome of the crash was certainly fortunate, there was little miraculous about it. Mark Rosenker of the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), was quoted in an MSNBC article as saying that "There is this myth out there that says if you're involved in a catastrophic aircraft accident the odds are extremely low. [In fact], the odds are extremely high." According to an NTSB study of 568 crashes between 1983 and 2000, only five percent of passengers were killed; the remaining 95 percent escaped unharmed or without life-threatening injuries. In another study of more serious crashes, the odds were better than 50/50 that passengers got out alive. And crashes that occur on the ground, as Flight 358 did, often have very high survival rates.

In modern hyperbole a miracle often simply means "unexpected good fortune" from the labeler's perspective. Journalists, preferring sensationalism to statistics, saw the burning metal wreckage and incorrectly assumed the crash was unsurvivable without consulting experts. The traveling public, who already dramatically overestimate the dangers of air travel, have been primed by a fear-mongering news media to assume the worst.

The fact that all the passengers survived is almost certainly due to science, skill, and circumstance. Attributing the passengers' survival to a miracle is an insult to the bravery, skill, and experience of the Flight 358 crew, who trained for years to handle just such emergencies. By all accounts, the Air France crew acted quickly and professionally during the emergency. They made sure that all passengers were buckled in for the landing and evacuated promptly.

The miracle designation also ignores the countless engineering safety measures and devices built into the Airbus A340. After all, the airplane design is the result of decades of safety engineering. Scientists help make aircraft materials stronger and lighter, and crashes more survivable (designing impact-resistant fuel tanks, for example, and flame-snuffing foam). After a century of flight, airplanes are safer than they ever have been, and remain far safer than autos on the nation's highways.

Less than a year earlier, on October 19, 2004, another "miracle crash" occurred. A commuter plane carrying doctors to a medical conference took off from St. Louis and crashed in a wooded area near Kirksville, Missouri. Thirteen passengers and crew were killed; the only survivors were hospitalized but sustained relatively minor injuries such as broken bones. Dr. Charles Zeman, director of trauma services at Northeast Regional Medical Center, said, "We see car accidents with worse injuries coming in here every week. This is truly a miracle." Zeman's comment on the miraculous nature of the accident was quoted in a CNN headline story.

The comment, though perhaps offhanded, is interesting because it demonstrates the low standard of modern miracles. Using the term miracle to describe this crash seems strange, given that nearly everyone aboard the crashed plane died a horrible and fiery death. Random chance and safety engineering accounts for the fact that the two survivors avoided life-threatening injuries: the pair was seated next to the emergency escape door, which popped open on impact.