How does someone survive a plane crash that kills almost everyone else?
The lone survivor of Air India Flight 171 was seated in an exit row window seat.
When Air India Flight 171 crash-landed shortly after take off, smashing into a residential building and bursting into flames, it seemed impossible that any of the 242 occupants could have survived.
Miraculously, one did—but how?
The passenger who survived the Boeing 787 Dreamliner crash in India was seated in 11A, an emergency exit row at the front of the economy cabin.
He is on a very short list among aviation’s worst disasters. Over the past eight decades of commercial travel, there have been fewer than 20 crashes where planes carrying 80 or more occupants left a sole survivor or two, according to data collected by the Flight Safety Foundation, an international nonprofit that provides safety guidance.
A previous example was in January when two flight attendants survived a Jeju Air plane crash in South Korea that killed 179 people. The attendants were seated in the rear when the Boeing 737 slammed into an embankment and burst into flames.
Investigators assessing the survivability of a plane crash focus on five factors: integrity of the aircraft, effectiveness of safety restraints, G-forces experienced by passengers and crew, the environment inside the aircraft and postcrash factors such as fire or smoke.
“There are a lot of reasons someone may survive in what appears to be a totally unsurvivable situation," said Barbara Dunn, president of the International Society of Air Safety Investigators.
“Depending on how the aircraft lands and where a passenger is seated has an impact," she said. “If you have your seat belt tightened, it limits the amount of flailing the body goes through. It also depends on whether a passenger is able to assume a brace position."
The wreckage of the Jeju Air aircraft that went off the runway and crashed at Muan International Airport in South Korea in December.
The relative safety of where occupants are seated during a crash varies, and one of the biggest factors is how the aircraft touches down. Passengers up front in a nose-first crash bear the brunt of the impact, but other factors also come into play.
“A lot of people think it’s safer in the back than in the front," Dunn said. “Not necessarily. How quick the fire takes over and how quick you can get to an exit, all those things matter as well."
In February, all 80 passengers and crew survived after a Delta Air Lines regional flight crash landed and flipped over at Toronto Pearson International Airport.
The National Transportation Safety Board deems a crash “survivable" if the forces transmitted to occupants don’t exceed the limits of human tolerance and the structure of the aircraft surrounding the occupants remains largely intact. A crash is deemed nonsurvivable when the G-forces are so great, the body can’t withstand the punishment.
The NTSB survivability definitions don’t take into consideration the effect of hazards such as smoke or fire, nor do they hinge on whether there are, in fact, survivors in a crash.
“When you hear survivable, you’d think people survived, and when you hear nonsurvivable, you’d think everybody dies," said Anthony T. Brickhouse, an expert in aerospace safety and a professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. “We’ve had people survive what we would call nonsurvivable crashes, and we’ve also had people die in what we would call survivable crashes."
To understand occupant-survivability rates in serious accidents, the NTSB examined commercial flights between 1983 and 2017. Serious accidents were defined as having had a fire, at least one serious injury or fatality and a substantially damaged or destroyed aircraft. Thirty-five crashes met that criteria.
In one, a 4-year-old girl was the only survivor among 155 occupants aboard a McDonnell Douglas DC-9 that crashed shortly after takeoff in Detroit in 1987.
The wreckage of Northwest Airlines Flight 255 was strewn over a 3,000-foot crash path that crossed two highway overpasses, according to the NTSB accident report. All of the passenger seats were detached and scattered along the way. The surviving child, who had been traveling with her parents and brother, was found in the wreckage beneath one of the overpasses.
She had been assigned seat 8F.
Just over half of the 3,823 occupants in the accidents studied by the NTSB survived with minor or no injuries; 6.3% experienced serious injuries; 27% died from impact; 4.1% died from fire or smoke; and about 10% died from other or unknown causes.
In its Northwest 255 accident report, the NTSB said the passengers and crew died of blunt-force trauma, the plane disintegrated during final impact, and the crash destroyed the cabin. It was, the report concluded, nonsurvivable—except for a combination of fortuitous circumstances that spared one preschooler.
“Sometimes things happen, and it’s really hard to explain," Brickhouse said. “I hate to use the term, but sometimes luck does come into play."
Write to Jo Craven McGinty at jo.mcginty@wsj.com and Alison Sider at alison.sider@wsj.com
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