Posted on 07/08/2013 7:55:25 AM PDT by BenLurkin
When seconds can mean the difference between life and death in escaping an aircraft accident, it was startling to see so many photographs from the crash of Asiana Flight 214 at San Francisco International Airport of people carrying out bags, including roll aboards that must have come out of the overhead luggage bins. At least one man interviewed in the New York Times indicated that he grabbed his bags and then his child. In that order. All I can say is that it was very fortunate that the fire was slow to spread.
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
Stupid ain't the word for that...or this.
“Asian culture related?”
Save the cameras...
Part of the slow evacuation (and daily slow exiting) comes from the fact that the airlines have significantly reduced the space between the seats. I am of the opinion that for safety reasons, there needs to be at least 12” between the front of one seat and the back of the seat in front of it.
Right. But the reason the people in back are not moving is because people in front are opening up the overhead bins and grabbing their bags. This is typical of the flight culture today. Me first. Let me cram as much stuff in my enormous suitcase and shove it in the overhead because I sure don’t want the hastle of checking my bag. And damn right I am going to retrieve my precious bag of clothes in a crash. Screw those people in back - let em roast. It’s like the scene in the Focker movie. People are nuts about their stupid bags.
Did anyone grab a live chicken?
I just heard about a passenger in the back saying she grabbed her bags and went out the hole in the back.
Korean airlines...cats.
You play like you practice. Have these passengers ever practiced an emergency evacuation where they are taught to NOT take their bag? No. Have they practiced normal evacuations (i.e. normal exiting of planes) where they DO take their bags. Yes.
If you want this not to happen you’d have to train people do behave in a particular way it seems to me. And I don’t see a practical way to accomplish this.
This has been common in air disasters. People operate unthinking on automatic. When they get up they’re trained to pick up their baggage. I only recall one stewardess addressing this in her safety speech.
This is why I always try to sit in the exit row. In essence, people are unthinking automatons.
“Looking at the picture from inside the cabin, the overhead bins may have popped open on impact and spilled their carryons.”
This sounds like a pretty logical thought. If the bags fell out of the bins you might have needed to pick them up anyhow to unblock the aisle. Instead of placing them in the seats it might have been easier to evacuate the plane by holding on to them as you left the plane instead of maybe re-blocking the aisle.
I saw a live goat while sitting in the transit lounge at Cairo Airport about 30 years ago.With God as my judge!
Ditto. If I have time to grab my bag, I'll grab my bag.
And they were probably staring at their cell phones as they slid down the emergency exit ramp.
Before you condemn these people, why don’t you question the accuracy of the reporting? It’s the New York Times. Their Sunday Corrections column is bigger than the magazine section.
Who knows how any one would react in an emergency? Besides that, isn’t it possible the bags got tossed into the aisles in an emergency landing?
Everybody doesn’t exit immediately - there’s a queue, and I’d probably grab my bag, too, if I had a chance to without delaying the evacuation.
On the same line of thinking, how many of those passengers took a little longer doing something—getting out of their seats, moving through the cabins, sliding down the ramps or otherwise exiting the planes, or even evacuating the area afterwards because they were texting, talking, or videoing something on their phones?
Given the hard landing, I wouldn’t be surprised if most of the overhead bins popped open and scattered bags into the aisles and on top of the people sitting in aisle seats. In fact, evacuation tests are done with bags scattered in the aisle. Why not take the bag in your lap or lying in the aisle with you with you? Are we going to make this a federal crime, too?
If I were the King of Airlines carry on luggage would be banned.
The best way to fundamentally change this is by means of drills - like fire drills, cruise ship “muster” drills and the like. No individual airline could ever do this because they don’t have the time and also it would send the wrong message.
What *could* be done would be a mandatory “flyers ed” course (by analogy) with drivers ed - where you practice evac procedures on a mock up plane in order to be permitted to fly. Which sounds like incredibly “nanny state” but from a purely practical standpoint *could* save a life or two over time.
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