Most terrifying air disaster

And?

0/10.

I think the doomed 9/11 flights are the most terrifying. I can't imagine what that must have been like.

Indeed. Still those were human directed. The Swiss Air crash was caused by the manufacturer. You get in a plane, particularly a Swiss plane, and there is an assumption that its air worthy.

Japan Airlines 123 comes to mind. Google it.

Link it fat lazy whore.

Kobe Bryant's helicopter crash seemed pretty brutal, especially judging by the reports of the state of his body after the wreckage was found. Not pretty.

R7

Those poor kids.

Ummm…..

No one really cares about 9/11 anymore. Think of all the death and destruction that America has rained down on the middle east and you fat cunts are still crying about that 1 day, 20 years later.

Alaska 261 in January 2000. Two terrifying dives to the ocean, the second one from 24,000 feet, where the plane was nose-diving, inverted, and spinning.

Isn't that the flight where the plane flew upside down while the pilots trained to regain control?

Nasty!

Underinflated tires on Nigeria Airways 2120 caused a fire which burned through the cabin floor with passengers falling out before the plane crashed.

^ tried to regain control, not trained

That flight that took off from Miami with improperly stored batteries, which shouldn't have been on board to begin with, and burst into flames. The fire spread up from the cargo hold into the passenger cabin. The pilots had to lock and bar the cockpit door to keep the the passengers from breaking in but on the cockpit voice recorder you can hear them screaming, pounding the door and begging to be let in as they burned. The pilots eventually lost control and it crashed into the Everglades. No survivors.

Improperly stored oxygen generators, not batteries.

I stand corrected.

This was gruesome. Germanwings Flight 9525 from Spain to Germany.

The Tenerife one where two planes crashed. To date the deadliest air disaster (not counting the 9/11 ones).

All airline disasters are horrible. I think those where people fall to earth from them are the worst.

Fortunately, there are some miraculous survival stories too like Vesna Vulovic.

For me, it's a toss-up between Swiss Air 111 and Saudia Flight 163

What was the Russian one where the pilots let kids sit in their seats and play with the controls and they didn't realize until the plane went into an unrecoverable dive that the little boy had disengaged the autopilot?

Aeroflot 593.

I'm terrified of flying and it's becoming worse and worse with time. I hate it but I hate even more the people that "love" to fly (I envy them), can't stand the ones that are constantly mocking us and state that everything is "always" ok. I fucking hate it/them.

My favourite TV show is Mayday, I guess I need to embrace my S&M side and acknowledge it too...

[R6], if you were addressing me, fuck the fuck off. Anyway, here's a youtube link. There are lots of vids about it. I'd suggest clicking on anything under 10 minutes, as the facts present themselves.

R10 I hope Karma hits you back sooner or later

I was oh an American flight once where they ran out of gin. That was a disaster let me tell you!!!

There’s a podcast called Black Box Down that’s all about plane crashes. They covered the one that R23 refers to. I’m sure those kids would’ve gotten in a lot of trouble if everyone hadn’t died.

[quote] on the cockpit voice recorder you can hear them screaming, pounding the door and begging to be let in as they burned.

R16, your link says nothing like that.

Black Box down covered one where I think the plane came apart over a Brazilian rainforest or something. A young woman was ejected from the plane and fell into the forest and actually survived. It was a day or two before she was found and rescued.

That one sounded terrifying to me. They explained how she didn’t die from the fall - I don’t remember the details, but I think it had something to do with the way the wind carried her or something. It was essentially a freak natural occurrence. She has no memory of it.

Air Florida Flight 90, January 13, 1982. The plane crashed into the 14th Street Bridge flying from National Airport in DC to Fort Lauderdale. I was in my car on the wrong side of the Potomac, and got stuck there for hours near Key Bridge on my way home from work in McLean. 78 people perished.

Yes, that's the OP, r26. It's doubtful he has "UN colleagues" as he claims in the OP, unless the UN hires incoherent rage junkie trolls, but I suppose they might.

[quote] Japan Airlines 123 comes to mind.

That was the deadliest single crash in aviation history. Well over 500 people were on board and there were only a few survivors. It crashed into a mountain, I think.

Several more people survived the initial crash, but died while waiting to be rescued.

[quote] the UN hires incoherent rage junkie trolls

Some of he most worthless pieces of shit in the world work in international development.

R30, those parts were never widely reported. Both the voice recording and its transcript were highly edited. I read the details on one of those professional pilots forums several years ago, I don't remember which one.

R34, the US military offered to help in the rescue but Japan turned it down, presumably to save face. If they had accepted the offer rescuers may have gotten to the mountainside that night and more people saved. The Japanese didn't reach the site until the next day.

Articles at the time implied it r36, without going into too much detail, but you can imagine what was going on.

MH17, the one that got shot down over Ukraine by a Russian ground missile. Passengers had a few seconds to realise something terribly wrong was happening.

Wow, OP. I was a teenager back then and faithfully tracked major air disasters, but I seriously don't recall that one. As someone who has regularly flown that route on different airlines, I've noticed there tends to be an uptick in turbulance in that area. I know that wasn't the cause of the crash, but as a nervous flyer I can't relax until the plane hits mainland North America.

People on their way home for christmas and people on the ground taken out as well.

My mother's cousin was a passenger on Pan Am 103. I've done some reading on the incident, focusing more on the experiences of those on the ground. But, I am conflicted about something, because I've read both sides of it, and can't make up my mind as to wh. is true. The passengers who weren't killed outright by the explosion that separated the forward end of the fuselage from the rest (shrapnel, flying anything), would have lost conciousness nearly instantly. Now, I've read catastrophic decompression at thirty one thousand feet sucks the air out of your lungs and kills you instantly. That makes sense to me. The other side of this is that if you survive the initial decompression uninjured, you regain conciousness at around thirteen thousand feet. There are reports that villagers heard screaming coming from above as the wreckage was falling to Earth.

Being somewhat close to the whole thing, it's impossible for me to spend any amount of time researching things. To be honest, I one day plan to see if I can find Dave's cause of death, if it's available.

On another aviation topic entirely, airline pilots who cross the equator start lobbying ATC as soon as they're cleared after departure, to cross it at forty thousand feet, because any altitude lower than that makes the aircraft shake 'like a bed in a whorehouse,' accd'g to a UAL captain I was acquainted with.

For me, the scariest flights would've been Germanwings 9525 (seeing the pilot beg to get in the cockpit while the plane gradually descended right into the Alps) and Aloha Airlines Flight 243. There was only 1 fatality, but that's the one where a section of the roof of the cabin ripped off at cruising altitude. Fortunately, all the passengers were wearing their seatbelts, but a flight attendent was sucked out of the plane and her body was never found.

Was this an early attempt to take out people who could prove AIDS was man-made in a lab?

Amelia Earhart’s.

Wasn't there some plane disaster where the only survivor was a young girl?

[quote]Most terrifying air disaster

First episode of first season of Lost.

Fascinating, r21. Thanks for reminding me of this miraculous survivor.

R46 Yes it was the one where the girl fell to earth in her seat and survived and had to trek through the rainforest to find help, if I recall correctly. LANSA Flight 508

TWA 800 for me.

I assume this thread was created to troll all of us about to start flying again. Bravo.

I don't think flying needs any additional trolling. Getting in an enclosed space with x hundred passengers, roughly 5% whom will have Covid for an extended period of time, then queue up for a further extended period of time at the other end, with it without enforced quarantine, before being allowed on your way.

I somehow think that this thread is only a minor fly in flying's ointment.

I’m not flying anywhere ! If God took that church lady with the big hair, I could be next!

R51, there's actually an eerie DL coincidence I've experienced numerous times over the past 20 years: Whenever I'm within a month of flying someplace, a thread about a plane crash is started or bumped.

After 5 years of making several trans-Atlantic flights a year, my fear of flying had been greatly reduced. However, due to the pandemic I only flew in an airplane to/from one destination, and that fear has returned. I had planned on flying to somewhere for a vacation next month, but this thread has me rethinking things.

Like OP, I’ve taken the Swissair flight before and after the accident. It’s a creepy feeling on the one hand—on the other hand, it was comforting knowing the odds of it happening again were miniscule.

[quote] Japan turned it down, presumably to save face.

That’s exactly why. This is a huge deal in East Asian cultures in a way that non-Asians don’t completely comprehend. Japan was probably horrified that the offer was even made.

My brother in law who was a private pilot told me that unless it’s a bomb or a missile there’s usually more than one issue happening if a plane is going to crash. If it’s just one issue the pilot can usually handle it. But if that one issue starts a cascading effect you’re fucked. Think of the Boeing 737 Max with the computer glitch.

1987, Northwest Flight 255 in Detroit. Killed around 150 people at takeoff and only one little girl survived. That was a pretty horrific one at the time.

Yes r57 they used to build in multiple redundancies to avert a failure. Now they pay someone in India $8/hr to program the software.

Concorde crash. Plane was in flames as it climbed.

TWA Flight 800.... practically in my backyard. We heard the plane blow up and then for months after watched as they pulled pieces of the 747 out of the water and through our town of Hampton bays daily.

It was heartbreaking

[quote] Think of the Boeing 737 Max with the computer glitch.

Did they trying shutting it down, waiting a few seconds and then rebooting? That probably would have fixed it.

Fatal Collision over Europe | Boeing 757 Collides with a Russian Tu-154

It amazes me the retirement of the Concorde in the early 2000s represents a step back in technology that STILL hasn't been replicated. Wouldn't it be just as lucrative to conduct more flights in a shorter period as it is to try to fit as many people in a slower plane as possible?

r5 The "pull up pull up" From the warning system before the explosion is horrifying

Did I miss someone posting the Teneife crash?

R64, living on Long Island, there was nothing more magnificent that watching the SST fly over the Island as it made its way to Kennedy Airport

I was once on a flight where one of the flaps stopped functioning and the plane was yawing from left to right for over an hour before we could return to the airport. I’ve never seen so many people so quiet on a flight.

R66 that was a cool plane. I saw it take off once at JFK and saw it several more times on the tarmac.

While waiting to board Swiss Air 111 in NYC I would look out at the British Airways SST parked at a nearby gate. A beautiful aircraft. Never flew it however. Friends who did said it was cramped and noisy.

A thinly disguised Plane Crash Death Troll thread with the repeated discussion of how horrible it would be to die in a plane crash and the constantly asked question of “would passengers be unconscious or conscious” and at what level of elevation do they go unconscious, and at what level does consciousness return.

Been discussed a trillion time, but it appeals to someone with OCD. Probably gets a sexual thrill from it and searches plane crash wikis for a wanky.

Moscow’s airport (all Russian airports) was not a great airport from what I had read. Experienced this first-hand. We were on a descent going onto the runway on Lufthansa. We were about to land when suddenly we started a rapid ascent. The pilot came on to tell us that there was an error and the tower had sent two airplanes at the same time to land on the same runway. I always hold my breath since then when I have to fly into Moscow.

Another time (although this was a chartered Russian flight) the airplane took off before everyone sat down because they were trying to make their arrival time. The stewardesses ended up dragging themselves up the aisle trying to get to their seats while the plane ascended.

The MD-11 in the OP’s post had an additional problem: the horizontal stabilizer was too small for the aircraft. The pilots of this type had to manage pitch & trim very carefully.

The Hawaii airlines one where the roof of the jet came off - and the flight attendant got sucked out must have been terrifying. ALOHA BABY!

They are all horrible. There was one I read about where there was one lone survivor who was flying with her mom. she was in a 3 seat row and the seat row started to spin like a helicopter blade, slowing her descent, and she hit a tree that helped break the fall. She had to trek through the jungle in South America with maggots in her broken leg for days before being saved.

Also the one in Germany that killed Melanie Thornton from La Bouche. Imagine all of the amazing Wales Pride Festivals she had ahead of her??

R69 - yes. It was cramped. Similar to an Embraer Regional Jet. And still, worth every penny.

R74 was the food and service as good as they say? I’m pissed off I was too young to ever experience it.

The flight attendant who got sucked of the plane was more horrible than it initially sounds. The structural failure started with a hole the size of a pin. Suddenly the hole widened enough for her head and neck to get sucked out but her shoulders stopped her body from going through. Passengers could hear her head being repeatedly slapped against the plane's side. Finally the roof ripped off from where she was up to the cockpit and away she went.

There are photos of the plane immediately after landing before even before the passengers could be unbuckled. A few of them show a red spot on the side. It's the outline of her head formed in her blood.

A close friend of my mother and her daughter were on that Value Jet flight. The daughter was about to get married and she and her mother had gone down to the Caribbean for a vacation.

OP- I find that crash to be the most horrifying as well.

I never quite understood why it was so destructive to the aircraft and bodies as it did not crash from a high altitude.

It is because it was at full speed when it crashed. I believe it crashed at 450 miles per hour.

The dark, the ocean, the intense fire in the cabin- I cannot fathom. At least death was instant for all.

On Youtube, this guy who has traveled for his entire career has videos of different aircraft from the 90's. He has a 15 minute video of the actual SwissAir aircraft from 1997 or 1998 when he was on it. I have to find it.

[quote] I have to find it.

No.

You don’t

The Concorde caused a lot of noise pollution and the operating costs were high. Concorde burned about 25,000 liters per hour and carried 100 passengers while a Boeing 787 burns 11,000 liters per hour and carried 242 passengers.

R78. That would be appreciated.

The one in Sioux City where the plane cartwheeled down the runway seemed terrifying. A surprising number of passengers though but I think the pilot never flew again.

United Airlines Flight 232, My relative landed the plane- he was riding in First Class when the plane hit trouble.

Here you go R81-

I think its very interesting that this video exists.

I suppose its maudlin, but its kind of moving as well.

And it is from 1996. Which feels like 3 lifetimes ago. I was 19!

While your need to reduce things to puerile sexual fetish, [R70], it might surprise you that most of us moved beyond that at six years old. But thank you for you entirely unnecessary input.

J'adore Swiss Air. Flying from Zurich to Geneva is like flying over a fairytale landscape as the aircraft flies very low, at about 14k feet I believe. One can see villages below and its a bit magical as street and house lights begin to come on around dusk. Then Europe's largest lake Lac Leman appears on the left and the aircraft follows its banks into Geneva. Gorgeous flight.

R232! No way!!! Your relative was Dennis Fitch?? (I think they Called him Denny?)

The guy was awesome. I read a pretty good book on Flight 232 and have seen some videos of this man.

Didn't he pass away not too long ago. RIP and my condolences. He seemed like an awesome man.

^^^^Sorry, that was for R83 regarding Dennis Fitch.

232 was the Flight Number

Yes, R87, he did pass away fairly recently. He was a great man, very supportive to me when I came out. His son, Denny Jr., was my best friend growing up- straight, but like Ferdinand the Bull.

[quote] Underinflated tires on Nigeria Airways 2120 caused a fire which burned through the cabin floor with passengers falling out before the plane crashed.

R14 Is this where Tom Petty got the inspiration for his iconic song - Free Fallin

r21, that woman's story is very interesting.

[quote] MH17, the one that got shot down over Ukraine by a Russian ground missile. Passengers had a few seconds to realise something terribly wrong was happening.

Sum Ting Wong and. Ho Le Fuk were both passengers in this flight I think.

[quote] For me, the scariest flights would've been Germanwings 9525 (seeing the pilot beg to get in the cockpit while the plane gradually descended right into the Alps) and Aloha Airlines Flight 243. There was only 1 fatality, but that's the one where a section of the roof of the cabin ripped off at cruising altitude. Fortunately, all the passengers were wearing their seatbelts, but a flight attendent was sucked out of the plane and her body was never found.

Sharks probably, Hawaiian waters are full of them.

No R92, they were on the Asiana flight that crashed on touch down at SFO.

Salt Lake! Salt Lake! This is Nancy, the senior stewardess. All the flight crew is either dead, or seriously injured. There's no one left to fly the plane!!!!!

R92/r94, and all DLers, am I misremembering or did some post here on DL that they were the intern?

R23 As the plane was going down, the G-force pinned the kid to his seat and prevented the crew from getting to him. The last things this poor kid heard was his idiot father screaming futile orders and putting the blame on him ("what did you do?!")

I saw this one recently and it horrified me to think of the passengers’ final moments. The Flight Channel on YouTube does exquisite re-enactments of aviation disasters.

PSA flight 182 will haunt me forever. That's the one that collided with a Cessna and came down in a San Diego neighborhood, just as it was coming in for landing. A news photographer just happened to be in the area, and captured the plane a split second before impact. If you Google Street View the area, you can see the patched-up pavement where the plane hit. This was the crash featured in the infamous "Faces of Death" video. Bodies literally flew through people's windows and rooftops. One victim ended up as a splatter against someone's home.

An eerily similar crash was the Aeromexico crash in Cerritos in 1986. That one also involved a midair collision with a small craft, was photographed as it fell (inverted and nearly vertical), and ended up in a neighborhood.

If you mean terrifying to passengers on the plane, any of the flights on which passengers understand that they are going to die. Like the Alaska flight that crashed into the ocean, the two 737’s that had stuck hard over rudders (Colorado Springs and Pittsburgh), all of which must have been horrific for the passengers. United 811, whose cargo door blew out and rows of seats blew out. The plane returned to Honolulu, but I cannot imagine the thoughts going through the passengers’ minds wondering if the plane would continue to fly.

Or terrifying to people who witnessed crashes, like 9/11, especially the United flight that thousands of people saw crash in person and on live TV.

To me, MH 170 is the one I let upset me. How, with modern technologies, can a jumbo jet simply go missing? At least the Air France flight from Brazil to CDG was eventually located at the bottom of the Atlantic and we know why it crashed.

Ok, I know I’m opening a can of worms, but what is the prevailing opinion re MH 170? It is indeed crazy that it hasn’t been located.

R89- You could tell that he was a good guy- So nice to hear that. You were very lucky. He seemed extremely intelligent too. XOXOXOXOXO

Obviously it crashed, since parts have washed up on the shores of islands in the Indian Ocean. But the uncertainty lives rent free in my mind.

I knew 4 people who got killed in the SwissAir flight. Two were from WIPO and 2 were former colleagues. The crash bankrupted SwissAir which was one of the best and safest airlines till then.

^^ didn't I blow you in Geneva?

R75 - yes, by airline standards it was incredible. But no one buys a $10,000 airline ticket for the meal.

R105 yes you did and you weren't a keeper.

Have I been mentioned in this thread yet?

For those who were asking what flying on the Concorde was like, there was a thread about it from last year...

The 2021 Gulfstream inferno in Santa Barbara and subsequent explosions in Montecito

A great, yet seemingly inexorable, loss

If I knew I was going to die I'd probably rather be outside of the plane than in it

For sure, the Aloha flight whose fuselage ripped apart. You better hope your seat belt stays fastened while this bitch comes in for a landing.

I suppose the PanAm flight that fell on Lockerbie, Scotland must be one of the worst scenarios. Gaddafi's henchmen bombed the plane so it not only killed everybody in the plane but a shitload of people on the ground when the plane exploded.

R11 I came here to mention that one. Two dives, and an inversion before the crash into the ocean? Unreal. The only others I can imagine that would've been more terrible are the 9/11 crashes.

TWA 800 broke in half and flew for some time before both parts dropped to the Atlantic. For passengers....OMG.

I’m always the SAA295 troll on these threads. This South African Airways 747 had a cargo fire towards the end of its flight from Taiwan to Johannesburg in 1987, and went down in the Indian Ocean near Mauritius. It is kind of similar to Swissair 111.

TWA Flight 800 NY Paris. Took off from JFK and exploded off the coast of Long Island. 16 students and five chaperones from the Montoursville Pa. High School French Club were on board for a school trip. Some witness said they saw what appeared to be a missile hit it, but the official explanation was faulty wiring in the center wing fuel tank ignited the flammable fuel/air mixture, causing the explosion 12 minutes after takeoff.

Alaska 261 in January 2000. Two terrifying dives to the ocean, the second one from 24,000 feet, where the plane was nose-diving, inverted, and spinning.

not to be either dense nor pedantic, but if the plane was "inverted" wouldn't it be "buttdiving", not nosediving?

If you click on r112's link you can clearly see the red blood spatter from the flight attendant's head that I described at r76.

No, R118. Because while it was in an inverted attitude, the plane was crashing in a nose-down position, not tail-down, nose-up.

"Buttdiving"... FFS....

[R113], one of the wings that was full of fuel landing on a fucking gas station. I'm not an air crash ghoul. I mentioned upthread I distant relative was a passenger. I believe just before the wing impacted a mother and her son were on the street. A man and his family were becoming aware what was going on (at first the man heard what he thought was distant thunder but it kept getting louder). The man saw them, opened his door and got them inside. Moments later the wing impacted, vapourizing some residents. The woman and her son would have been severely injured if not killed outright if the man hadn't gotten them inside.

R118- Listen to the Cockpit Voice Recorder of those pilots of Alaska 261- Brave and professional men. Composed- and the true meaning of heroes. Its not always the outcome, but the grace that one shows when on their last minutes of a journey.

Really great pilots.

Those passengers went through utter hell. Just an insane situation.

Early reports stated that the Pan Am 747 crashed on a gas station, but that turned out not to be true. It came down in the village of Lockerbie itself, and the wings crashed in Sherwood Crescent, killing 11 residents of that street.

I remember watching some documentary about the Lockerbie crash and one couple was traumatized by the sight of a little boy still strapped in his chair in a tree on their property.

In terms of "fuselage peeling away" accidents I am surprised no one mentions this one.

THIS ONE is worse than Aloha Airlines by far...

9 lost-

United Flight 811-

Already mentioned.

For r118 -- Aeromexico flt. 498, inverted and nosediving:

This guy. Someday soon.

This one, for the people on the ground. Imagine you're at home at 10pm, getting ready for bed...and a fucking plane slams right into your house.

American Airlines Flight 191 at O'Hare.

I'd be more interested in "Least Terrifying Air Disaster."

[quote] Fatal Collision over Europe | Boeing 757 Collides with a Russian Tu-154

The husband of one of the victims on the Russian plane blamed the Swiss air traffic controller for her death…and tracked him down and murdered him in front of his family!!

Link.

I was friends with a medical examiner who had helped with TWA 800. He told me they would find parts of bodies ( e.g. a finger), but they would weight the coffin down with sand to give the illusion that an entire body was found for the family’s sake.

Apparently this is a thread for viewers of Air Disasters (Smithsonian Channel).

Any plane crash caused by a fire onboard would be the worst. The Nigerian Airways (a chartered flight flown by a Canadian airline, Nation Air) crash in Saudi Arabia and the Value Jet crash in Florida would be my picks. I’ve watched both these episodes. I had to stop watching the Nation Air episode and come back it later...... too graphic.

A close third would be the Korean Airlines flight 801 crash in Guam (1997) . It wasn’t a fire on board that caused the crash, however, several passengers died in the post-crash fire, trapped in the plane.

Given that smartphones and increased connectivity on planes, the next massive aviation disaster that happens over the ground could possibly be live streamed or shared on a cloud if the plane makes its way near a cell phone tower on its way down. The last big disaster happened over open ocean so we got nothing.

Air France flight 447.

[quote] On the last day of May in 2009, as night enveloped the airport in Rio de Janeiro, the 216 passengers waiting to board a flight to Paris could not have suspected that they would never see daylight again, or that many would sit strapped to their seats for another two years before being found dead in the darkness, 13,000 feet below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean. But that is what happened.

The ordeal of the plane as it slowly but perceptibly fell from the sky must have been agonizing. The quote above is from a gripping account of the problem suffered by the Airbus A330 that led the aircraft to plummet into the Atlantic Ocean and sink two miles down. The state of the bodies of the passengers makes it clear many were alive as the center of the fuselage went into the ocean, flooded, and sank.

R137- The thing crashed at a very high speed- It basically dropped horizontally (pancaked?) no one could have survived that. Water is like concrete.

I have also read conflicting reports about how much passengers would have known as the flight dropped altitude rather quickly but there were not insane forces going on-

R136 R137

The descent was so imperceptible that even the commander (senior captain) of the flight had been in the cockpit for several minutes until he noticed the altitude just before it crashed, too late to recover it. I doubt the (sleeping) passengers noticed a thing.

R125 Meet R100

A colleague of mine was on Swiss Air 111. He just left work one evening and never came back. He was a lawyer, going to Geneva to close a deal. It was just a formality so was supposed to be a fun trip. He was excited. An older man, he was usually very somber, but he was so relieved the deal had finally closed, and so excited to see Geneva, he even flirted mildly with the secretaries, which they found very amusing.

I later read about the flight. Just imagine what Stanley and the other passengers were thinking as the plane, out of control, lolled closer to the surface of the sea, its wing banked sharply to to right. Horrifying.

Years later, no longer working at that law firm, I was in Nova Scotia and visited Peggy’s Cove. I knew that’s where Stanley died and while it was eerie to be there, seeing the place and the sea did close the loop a bit for me.

R138 if that were true the plane would have been blown into a million tiny pieces and so would the passengers. Instead they were strapped in their seats, still largely intact, when found at the bottom of the sea two years later.

Contrast Swiss Air 111. It hit the sea hard. There were 216 passengers onboard. The exhaustive recovery effort found 15,000 body parts. That’s seventy pieces per body. And they didn’t find everything.

R142- I am sorry about your colleague. And yes, the impact of SwissAir shattered the aircraft and the passengers. It was one of the worst ever in that respect.

Re-read the article about AirFrance though- The impact was very different from SwissAir but still violent. None of the passengers knew.

R139 is correct, and its all in the Vanity Fair piece.

I saw a video recently taken of a airline crash site in a town in Iran or Iraq. It looked like someone had thrown pans of lasagna all over the place.

R16 That was the first fatal air crash in the US with a female pilot.

I remember reading when they located the SwissAir flight it was surrounded by mako sharks. Bon appetit.

[quote] recently taken of a airline crash site in a town in Iran or Iraq. It looked like someone had thrown pans of lasagna all over the place.

Don't try to turn this into another lasagna thread or it will be a disaster far worse than any airplane crash.

[quote]It looked like someone had thrown pans of lasagna all over the place.

Did it look like they had used ricotta or was it more like bechamel?

That would be Airport '75.

There was a documentary about people who go in after disasters to recover bodies and evidence, this was probably 20 years ago on Discovery, and they showed video footage of bodies up in trees after a plane crash. I assumed they'd fallen out of the plane but the show explained this often happened because bodies bounce up off the ground after impact. I don't remember which crash it was but I believe it was something from the late 1980s.

[quote] PSA flight 182 will haunt me forever. That's the one that collided with a Cessna and came down in a San Diego neighborhood, just as it was coming in for landing. A news photographer just happened to be in the area, and captured the plane a split second before impact. If you Google Street View the area, you can see the patched-up pavement where the plane hit. This was the crash featured in the infamous "Faces of Death" video. Bodies literally flew through people's windows and rooftops. One victim ended up as a splatter against someone's home.

Eeeewww, that’s gross. I don’t want some dead guy’s foot landing in my morning coffee or worse yet, some chick’s who-ha in my bathroom sink.

After spending some time looking for the documentary I mentioned in I now think I must not be remembering it right, because everything I'm finding indicates that what I described at r150 isn't likely. Maybe it was a reenactment.

One can hear the Japan Air pilot freaking out on the voice recorder tape. Yelling at his co-pilot who was at the controls and generally making things worse. Absolute mayhem..

Pablo Picasso’s “Le Peintre” was on board Swiss Air 111 and was lost in the crash.

This one, for the people on the ground. Imagine you're at home at 10pm, getting ready for bed...and a fucking plane slams right into your house.

Adrienne King the star of the original "Friday The 13th" had just that happen at her home on Long island. Avianca Flight 52 and she had $325,000.00 in damages to her house. She spent the day until 11:00PM helping with survivors. She tried to sue for emotional distress but the case was dismissed.

Plus I doubt home insurance covers falling aircraft.

[quote]Plus I doubt home insurance covers falling aircraft.

If you read the article her insurance did pay for the damage.

Insurance generally covers everything except Acts of God or Force Majeure (basically the same thing). Pilot error, metal stress, poor maintenance, etc. are not Acts of God.

I think any of the planes involved on 9/11 would qualify as the most terrifying, but especially flight 93. The islamic terrorists were brutal and it was clear to the passengers that their lives were worthless to these muslims. The passengers on flight 93 knew with certainty what would happen but they fought back against even knowing that they were going to their deaths. That is true bravery, fighting back even knowing that is all is lost.

OK I will never fly again. Thank you DL :D

R159- Hopefully the act of heroism in their last moments gave them their own sense of peace or a rush of adrenaline.. I guess one will never know.

I think being on that 2nd flight at the World Trade Center has to be the most frightening.. By then the passengers knew and as that place circled around and headed for WTC the passengers on the left side could see the buildings approaching.. Also, that flight descended extremely fast and people were vomiting, ect. It was like being on a rollercoaster. That to me is more frightening.

A minor factoid about the Avianca crash - it came down across from the house of John McEnroe’s parents.

Triage was set up on their front lawn.

For R160: Over the past 12 years, U.S. airlines have accomplished an astonishing feat: carrying more than eight billion passengers without a fatal crash.

R163 But doesn’t that make it statistically more likely that there will be a fatal crash with every day without one?

R164, that's not how statistics work.

Which is why I posed it as a question, R165. Care to elucidate?

[quote] Which is why I posed it as a question, [R165]. Care to elucidate?

Think of it this way: If you flip a coin, what are the chances of it being "heads"? 50%, of course. What if you flip a coin 10 times in a row, and all 10 times, it comes up tails. What are the chances that, on the 11th flip, it will be heads? The chances are still 50%. The other 10 flips have no bearing on the 11th flip. It's still 50-50. It's always 50-50. Similarly, all of the previous days without a fatal plane crash have no bearing on today's odds of a fatal plane crash.

R160...

Thanks R166 - I’ll try and remember that on my flight tomorrow!

how about the least terrifying air disasters?

I would think they would be the ones where the passengers all died instantly without knowing of the impending catastrophe. Like the KAL or MH flights shot down by the Ruskies or the Iranian flight shot down by the Americans. Maybe TWA 800 if they all died instantly upon the explosion.

TWA 800 was terrifying. The passengers flew after the plane broke in two. A few near the blast would have died. The rest were on a Disney ride to the ocean.

The Avianca flight crashed because it literally ran out of fuel, due to the incompetence of the pilots.

The aforementioned Germanwings Flight 9525, EgyptAir Flight 990, SilkAir Flight 185, and possibly Malaysia Airline Flight 370 are all terrifying, knowing that a single disgruntled or depressed person tasked with the responsibility of transporting hundreds of souls safely, chose instead to deliberately fly their planes into the side of a mountain or into the sea. It's horrible to think that all these passengers knew what was coming, and all for what? Pilot personal issues.

I was from Long Island and boaters went out in the dark and picked up the bodies of Flight 800 all night.

I’ve posted this before but, there used to be a website about PSA 182 that had a blog that initially started as having general information about the flight, airline etc. Then for whatever reason people slowly started responding to it who were affected by the crash and were there when it happened and shared their stories.

From family, friends and coworkers of the crew and PSA employees who died on the flight as well as the family and friends of the passengers, to first responders who were there, to people who lived in the neighborhood at the time.

It was in some ways like a therapy session. The first responders and people who lived in the neighborhood spoke in graphic detail about what they saw. The friends and family of the victims talked about their loved ones and the aftermath of the crash and family members of the victims asking PSA employees to share stories about their loved ones. Some of them were just kids when they lost their parent. Sad to read, but touching at the same time, you had the sense that a lot of these people got some closure and peace from writing and connecting with people who knew their loved ones.

This thread reminds me that we still don't have any idea what happened to MH370, and I wonder if we ever will?

The four year old girl that survived Northwest flight 255 in 1987 is one of the more amazing survival stories. She was the sole survivor of the flight that killed 150 people including her parents and brother. Her aunt and uncle raised her and released one photo of her during her recovery but refused the presses requests for photos or an interview. She finally granted an interview for the sole survivor documentary and she remembered nothing about the crash but had a few scars from the burns.

I knew an Air Force reservist at a unit near in airport. One time there was a fatal airplane crash nearby, and military members were brought in to help collect, tag, and bag body parts. I’ll never forget her saying there were body parts hanging from trees.

[quote] I don’t want some dead guy’s foot landing in my morning coffee

Sure Jan

Yikes, do not read that Vanity Fair article...it’s terrifying.

There really should be a button in the cockpit that allows the pilot to release nitrous oxide into the cabin when a crash is near certain.

une bonne idea

then the psycho pilots can murder the passengers

Also the last known remains of a PSA 182 victim was found in 1996. My memory is foggy but it was a hand that someone found in their back yard and it may have had a PSA seatbelt buckle attached or near it.

In addition to The Flight Channel on YouTube, Alec Joshua Ibay and Avinations also provide renditions of crashes.

Alaska 261 was pretty awful as the dives and flying upside down occurred over the course of 13 minutes.

The 3 Comet in-flight breakups and TWA800 were also terrifying as they occurred at low-enough altitudes where some passengers were aware of their plunge to the Earth.

R170, the Korean 747 shot down in 1983 was not instant death at all. It had a decompression and then spiralled down. The transcript includes passenger announcements telling them to put their oxygen mask on etc.

R181 they can already do that

R178- it sounds like the Pittsburgh area crash from 1994-

USAIR-