When I Was Young

Posted: 01 July 2009 1552 hrs

People attend a meeting in La Courneuve, near Paris, aimed at informing the Comoran community living in France on the crash of the Yemeni passenger jet.

PARIS: One of the black box flight recorders from the Yemenia jet which crashed off the Comoros has been located and efforts to retrieve it will begin Wednesday, the French government said.

"The black box's signal was located yesterday (Tuesday) at 4:30 pm local time (1230 GMT) by an aerial patrol, 40 kilometres (25 miles) from Grande Comore," said Cooperation Minister Alain Joyandet, quoted by a spokeswoman.

A French patrol ship, the Rieuse, was to arrive on site later Wednesday to start operations to recover the flight recorder, he added.

French rescue teams Wednesday joined in the search for survivors of the Yemenia jetliner, more than a day after it plunged into the sea while trying to land at Moroni airport in rough weather.

Sixty-six French nationals, and large numbers of Comorans resident in France, were among the 153 passengers of the Airbus A310.

A French military plane, two navy ships, Zodiac fast boats and other equipment have arrived from the neighbouring French island of Reunion to assist in the search.

A 14-year-old girl was saved from the seas off the coast of the Comoros archipelago, but the Red Cross has warned hopes of finding more survivors were slim.

- AFP/yt

From ChannelNewsAsia.com; see the source article here.

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June 30, 2009 -- Updated 2134 GMT (0534 HKT)

By Jim Kavanagh

CNN

Story Highlights

• Child reportedly survives crash of airliner in Indian Ocean
  
• Aviation experts say survival depends on type of impact, "luck of the draw"
  
• Statistical analysis shows rear of the plane is safer, writer says
  

Part of a United Airlines DC-10 lies next to the runway in Sioux City, Iowa, after the plane crashed in July 1989.

(CNN) -- Reports of a lone child having survived Tuesday's crash of a Yemenia Airways flight in the Indian Ocean have people wondering: How does anyone survive a plane crash?

"I just don't think there's any pattern to survivability. It's just luck of the draw and depends on how the plane goes in," said aviation expert John Eakin, head of Air Data Research in Helotes, Texas.

Not counting Tuesday's disaster, there have been 12 airliner crashes since 1970 that yielded a sole survivor, according to data compiled by Dr. Todd Curtis, director of the Airsafe.com Foundation. Five of those survivors were minors and four were crew members, accounting for 75 percent of the total.

"I can't figure out for the life of me why crew members and children tend to be disproportionate in these sole-survivor events," Curtis said.

One factor favoring flight crew members is their location in the sturdy cockpit and proximity to windows, he said. Flight attendants often use shoulder harnesses when they are seated, aviation writer David Noland added.

Where one is seated is a factor only in that it helps to be far from the point of impact, Eakin said.

"I don't think there's any particular type of aircraft or position in an aircraft which is more survivable, because it pretty much depends on what type of accident -- it depends on how the aircraft impacts," Eakin said. "Sometimes, the survivors are all located in the tail, sometimes in the forward fuselage. I don't think there's any rhyme or reason to it."

A 2007 Popular Mechanics magazine article, researched and written by Noland, presented a different view.

Noland analyzed 20 U.S. airline crashes in which at least one person lived and one person died. The statistics indicate that seats farther back in a plane are safer in crashes, the article said.

"Passengers near the tail of a plane are about 40 percent more likely to survive a crash than those in the first few rows up front," Noland wrote.

Passengers in seats behind the wings had a 69 percent survival rate in crashes that included at least one fatality, Noland wrote. Those with seats in coach areas over and forward of the wings survived 56 percent of the time, and passengers in first class and business class had a 49 percent survival rate, he found.

"To me, it's fairly obvious: You hit something going fast and obviously, the front is going to get crunched more than the back," Noland told CNN. "To quote one [National Transportation Safety Board] guy, 'Planes don't back into mountains.'"

Even in other types of crashes -- runway overruns, forced landings, etc. -- the plane is always going forward, so the front takes the impact, Noland said.

"That's why they put the crash recorders in the tail," he said.

Wide-bodied aircraft -- such as the Boeing 747 and 777 and the Airbus A310 and A330 -- tend to yield more survivors than smaller ones, Curtis said. He chalked up that trend to what he called the SUV theory: Larger crush zones provide more and larger areas of survivability.

Both Curtis and Eakin pointed to the July 1989 crash of United Airlines Flight 232 in Sioux City, Iowa. Spectacular video footage showed the McDonnell-Douglas DC-10 cartwheeling down an airport runway as pilot Al Haynes and first officer William Records tried to land the airliner without hydraulic controls. Of the 296 people aboard the plane, 111 were killed but 185 survived.

"Anyone looking at that crash at first, the video, would say, 'Well gee, how could anybody survive this?'" Curtis said.

"That was kind of a classic. A bunch of people survived that," Eakin said. "It looked terrible, and still so many people walked away from that. And there was no real pattern to where the survivors were located."

Availability of an escape route may be the biggest determining factor, Eakin said.

"If the impact is survivable, that's the next challenge: getting the heck out of the thing," he said. "I think in Sioux City, a lot of the survivors exited through cracks in the fuselage. That's kind of the ultimate escape route, but you gotta do whatever you gotta do to get out."

He noted the January 15 ditching of a US Airways Airbus A320 in New York's Hudson River, in which no one was killed and injuries were minimal, although the craft quickly filled with cold water.

"That really demonstrated how important it is to get out quickly," Eakin said.

Proximity of rescue equipment and personnel is key to survival too, Curtis said. If fires can be extinguished and survivors taken to hospitals quickly, victims have a better chance of surviving, he said.

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Despite his statistical evidence that the rear of the plane is safer, writer Noland doesn't seek out a back seat when he flies.

"I try to get a window seat," he said. "Planes are so safe, it's unbelievable how safe they are. The odds of a crash are so minuscule that I don't even worry about it."

From CNN.com; see the source article here.

Posted: 30 June 2009 1733 hrs

A man holds a relative of passengers of the Yemenia Airlines Airbus 310-300 that crashed near Comoros.

MORONI - A Yemeni Airbus A310 jet carrying 153 people crashed into rough seas as it came in to land in the Comoros islands early Tuesday but rescuers plucked a child survivor from the water, officials said.

It was the second time in less than a month that an Airbus has crashed into the ocean. This time French authorities said the Yemeni carrier had been under surveillance and that problems had been reported with the jet.

Bodies and wreckage from the Yemenia airline flight were spotted in the Indian Ocean near the island archipelago capital, Moroni, aviation officials said.

But a child among the 142 passengers and 11 crew on Flight IY 626 was rescued alive, a surgeon at the main Moroni hospital, Issa Ben Imani, told AFP.

Imani said the child was being taken to land where an ambulance waited to take the child to hospital.

Arfachad Salim, a rescue coordinator for the Comoros Red Crescent, confirmed that the child was alive and added that local fishermen had also found wreckage, passengers handbags and other effects.

In Sanaa, Yemenia's deputy managing director for operations Mohammed al-Sumairi said three bodies had also been recovered.

The long gruelling Flight IY 626 had started in Paris early Monday and made stops in Marseille, Sanaa and Djibouti before heading to Moroni.

Moroni international airport control tower lost contact with the jet just before it was due to land amid bad weather, airport director Hadji Mmadi Ali told AFP.

French civil aviation officials said 66 passengers were French. Three small babies were also among the passengers, officials said. France sent two navy ships and a plane from its nearby Indian Ocean territories to help the rescue.

"Bodies were seen floating on the surface of the water and a fuel slick was also spotted about 16 or 17 nautical miles from Moroni," senior Yemeni civil aviation official Mohammad Abdel Kader told reporters in Sanaa.

Kader said the wind was blowing in gusts of up to 115 kilometres an hour when the disaster happened.

"Weather conditions were bad," he said. "The sea was rough."

The Yemenia flight left Sanaa at 9:45pm (1845 GMT) on Monday and contact was lost at 1:51am on Tuesday (2251 GMT Monday), Kader said.

"Yemenia regrets to announce the missing of its flight No IY626 from Sanaa to Moroni with 142 passengers and 11 crew onboard Airbus 310-300," the airline announced on its website.

Airbus, which is still reeling from the crash of an Air France A330-320 into the Atlantic on June 1 with 228 people on board, set up a crisis cell straight away and sent investigators to the Comoros.

No cause has yet been announced for the Air France disaster. The black box flight recorders have yet to be found and their signal is due to stop emitting on July 2.

The European plane maker said the jet which crashed off Moroni was made in 1990 and had been operated by Yemenia since 1999.

France's Transport Minister Dominique Bussereau said inspectors had noted numerous faults on the Yemenia jet and the airline was being closely monitored by EU authorities.

"The A310 in question had been inspected in France in 2007 by the DGAC (French civil aviation authority) and a certain number of faults had been noted," Dominique Bussereau.

"The plane had not since then reappeared in our country," he told i-tele news.

Yemenia was not on an EU blacklist "but was being subjected to closer inspection by us and was due to soon be heard by the security committee of the European Union," he said.

Airbus said in a statement the jet had accumulated approximately 51,900 hours in the air from some 17,300 flights.

Yemen Airways was founded in 1961 before the formation in 1978 of Yemenia, which is 51 percent owned by the Yemeni government and 49 percent by Saudi Arabia, according to its website.

The Yemenia flight started at Paris Charles de Gaulle on Monday morning, using a more modern Airbus A330-200 for the first legs of the journey.

The plane flew to Marseille in southern France, where there is a large Comoran community, and then went on to Sanaa. There were about 100 passengers on board when it left Marseille, Yemeni civil aviation official Kader said.

In the Yemen capital, people from various Arab states joined the flight and the passengers changed to the Airbus A310 which first flew to Djibouti.

A crisis task force was set up at Paris Charles de Gaulle airport while psychologists were on hand at Marseille's airport to comfort the families of passengers on the plane.

- AFP/ir

From ChannelNewsAsia.com; see the source article here.