I do remain surprised at the |miracle" angle of this story as more facts come out
Actually many survive in a lot of crashes. So much is about structural integrity as the crash sequence goes on. Smoke is a huge killer - cant see to get out and the fumes from the iterior can be tocic. Much has been done regarding materials in aircraft. She was just a baby (age wise and had many of these improvements) A huge thing they did was change the G forces the legs on the seats can tolerate that is huge.
If you look at her she was actually totally intact at the end of the sequence.
All were already out by the time the fire did its thing with the fuselage.
A lot of stuff is coming out now questioning leaving. Once that happens , on the takeoff roll all aircraft cross a point of no return. Each takeoff is calculated with fuel number on board winds runway conditions to get a speed for each flight on each takeoff roll.
Its called V1. rotate V2 It is the speed on the runway that no matter what happens the flight crew must continue to with attempting to get the aircraft into the air. Does not matter what happens. The pilot not flying calls out V1 to pilot flying. After that there is another little time that passes to allow it to get to the next calculation - where the aircraft has enough air speed to lift the nose gear off the runway.
When that speed is hit the non flying pilot yells out commands . Then shortly after that they call out rotate - that means the pilot flying pulls back and she takes to the sky!!
There runway roll was long which makes me thing they had passed v1 and the machine took a little longer to hit the callout speed cause of weather . Or to put it another way they had passed the callout and had no other choice - they were committed to flight.
They had little distance to fall down - impacting speed at impact - structure more intact .
here is what it looks like::
notice capt flying keeps hands on throttle until the first call out - no need to have your hands on them after first callout you are dedicated to flying it off the runway!
They will know from recorder if they already hit V1 they did the right thing at that point
will also will probably hear a windshear yell out by the computer - that is just a serious warning that your gonna get a lot of changes of in speed changes
windshear is fascinating . WInd behind the aircraft (tailwind) suddenly pushes the plane forward real quick and their airspeed soars unexpectedly..the nose rises . The instantly try to put the nose down a bit . But then the wind shifts again suddenly and they are in a headwind. This makes the nose fall
So they are putting the nose a bit at first and then suddenly the headwind hits and the response to that is to pull up a bit - it is all so fast but they already have the nose headed down and then suddenly what they need is to pull it up
After delta 191 they really trained flight crews to be ready for the switches
tid bits
captain most seriously injured aboard
Seventeen people were still receiving medical attention Thursday.
