An evacuation by the book — but no miracle

“There is this myth out there that says if you’re involved in a catastrophic aircraft accident the odds are extremely low. That’s inaccurate. The odds are extremely high,” said Mark Rosenker, the acting chairman of the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board.

The board investigates aircraft accidents and has sent experts to Canada to help examine the four engines on the ill-fated Airbus A340-300. The U.S. team will also look at evacuation procedures and other reasons why all 297 passengers and 12 crew escaped.

Air France and airport rescuers credit the entire flight crew for managing the disaster calmly and professionally.

“The evacuation probably took two minutes maximum,” said Toronto airport fire chief Mike Figliola. “They (the crew) did a great job. They are trained to get the people off.”

Study: 95 percent in crashes survive
A U.S. safety board analysis of 568 crashes (71 of them fatal) between 1983-2000 found that 95 percent of passengers, or 51,000 people, survived. In a closer study of 26 notable crashes — those that included fire, serious injury or substantial damage or destruction of the plane — more than half of 2,700 occupants made it out alive. In Toronto, passengers beat those odds entirely with 100 percent survival.

Unsurvivable crashes usually always involve mid-air explosions or open-water accidents. Both of those factored into the TWA Flight 800 disaster in 1996 off New York. A Swissair MD-11 also crashed into the Atlantic off Nova Scotia in 1998 because of an onboard fire.

But in a ground crash similar to that in Toronto, an American Airlines DC-9 ran off the runway in Little Rock, Ark., during a violent rainstorm in June 1999. The jet struck a light fixture, slid into a ditch and caught fire. The captain and 10 others were killed, but 134 people survived. And in March 2000, 43 of 142 people aboard a Southwest Airlines 737 were hurt when the plane ran off the runway in Burbank, Calif.

Charles Eastlake, a pilot and a professor at Embry Riddle Aeronautical University, also credited passengers aboard the Air France flight. “In interviews, people seemed calm and collected. The mental attitude makes a gigantic difference in how quickly the plane gets evacuated,” he said.

Yasmin Ladak, a passenger, told CNN that passengers reached for their belongings and headed for the exits. “Everyone’s instinct was to get off the plane,” she said.

Ellie Larson, a flight attendant with United Airlines and an executive with the world’s largest flight attendants union, the Association of Flight Attendants, said passengers as a whole are more responsive to pre-flight instructions from the crew and more alert since the Sept. 11, 2001, hijack attacks.

“It’s very evident that people are far more cooperative and far more serious,” Larson said.

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