Department of Engineering Ideas that Work Great on Paper: “Do Planes Really Need Life Vests?” (WSJ, January 20, 2016) says “[life jackets] are so difficult to find under seats and put on securely in an emergency that only 33 passengers of 150 aboard US Airways Flight 1549 had a life vest after the plane splashed down in the Hudson River in 2009. Only four people managed to properly don their life vest, securing the waist strap so it wouldn’t pop off.”
[Separately, the article adds more weight to the legends of the crew: “Both Capt. Chesley ‘Sully’ Sullenberger and First Officer Jeffrey Skiles said they realized passengers had evacuated without life vests, so they grabbed a bunch from the cabin and handed them out after evacuating.” (Let’s also give three cheers to the WSJ reporter for not implying than an A320 is a single-pilot aircraft.)]
More to the point, have these vest ever saved a single passenger on a commercial flight? I doubt it.
Can’t read the paywalled WSJ text, which may have mentioned other sea ditchings with survivors, but if that wasn’t the case, then it seems unwarranted to me to base an entire article on a sample of one, the USAir 1549 in Hudson river. There must have been other air disasters over water where life vests provided at least the psychological support that the article’s author so easily discounted, if not difference between life and drowning (then again, habitual robot demonstrations of the donning of life vests in flights over land seem a waste of time to me… and hardly anybody onboard is watching such anymore anyway).
Provably saved? Hard to say. May have contributed to survival? Maybe. Three incidents come immediately to mind…
ETH961 ditched off Grande Comore after being hijacked and running out of fuel. 50 people survived; it seems reasonable to assume that life jackets played some role in the outcome here, since some passengers died after being trapped in the sinking aircraft (they had inflated their life jackets while still inside the cabin, and were unable to get away from the rising water levels).
CAL650 overran the runway in Hong Kong, went into the water, and sank. Everyone survived, with passengers wearing their life jackets; the plane stayed afloat after the incident, and as far as I know nobody ended up swimming on this one.
USA5050 overran the runway at KLGA and had passengers swimming with no vests. Apparently, the seat cushions aren’t very useful for staying afloat. Two people died, but not from drowning.
I can swim a mile in a 60F ocean, and If I’m going in anywhere further from shore than that, I want flotation. Even a 70F ocean will wear you down pretty quickly.
ianf – it’s easy to get past the WSJ paywall – put the article title in a google search and the 1st result will be the article. Click the link and the whole article will appear. Possibly this will only work a limited # of times – in that case use an incognito window.
The Hudson landing is VERY illustrative – the plane landed intact and so if there was EVER a case where the passengers were going to be able to properly don their vests, this was it and they couldn’t. The waist strap is particularly poorly designed. If they are going to carry them at all (and its not clear that they should – the cumulative # of lives saved by the vests appears to be zero) then the vests should be redesigned to be much more intuitive to put on. The most logical thing is to make them resemble an item of clothing such as a down vest with a zipper because people already know how to put on clothes. A sinking airplane is no place to be fiddling with threading straps thru loops, etc.
Jackie—thanks thanks for the WSJ paywall tip, I kind of knew it, but can seldom be bothered to jump through such hoops… and in any event was discussing Phil’s impression of, not the text itself.
However, as regards the rest, you may think logically, but are nowhere near a better airplane life vest solution. Apart from the fact that presence and minimal flotation capacity of such vests onboard is in all likelihood stipulated in some supranational industry-wide agreements of long past, hence a dog to amend[*], the present over-the-head, then tie-a-strap-under-crotch-design to hold the float doen, then inflate outside the cabin sounds pretty optimal to me. In any event it’s hard to come up with a simpler concept… says right so in the WSJ article (which sort of nullifies its v. raison d’être, but that’s another issue). I quote:
That last is more of a wishful thought than anything else, because people are not logical automatons, least of all in moments of grave stress. I was once peripherally involved in prepping future air hosts in how to evacuate passengers from a obnoxiously noisy, smoke-filled cabin hitting the ground. Despite the exercise premises, and the crew’s advance knowledge, the panic errors were abundant in well over half the cases.
[^*] every airplane ticket that I examined in the past century carried a note about the airline’s maximum liability for loss of life and luggage that was agreed upon in the “Warsaw convention of 1929,” i.e. at a time when air travel was something of a novelty. Twice ratified, last time in 1971, I used to wonder while it was in force for 70 years, until 1999.