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Would it be more horrifying to be strapped into an airplane seat in a 500 mph nose dive toward the earth or lying face down in a guillotine waiting for the blade to drop?
I have often thought that same question. Don't know the answer. I would hope that people didn't realize it and it was over before they were aware of anything-fear, pain, etc.
And yes, I am afraid to fly but do anyway because I love my husband. (Long story.)
I would like to think that in this particular tragedy death was almost instantaneous. Some of the crash scene photos coming out are horrific. In one photo a body has crashed through a roof into someone's bedroom.
Another sad aspect of this situation is that there will probably never be any punishment or reasonable compensation for the passenger's families. The Ukraine rebels appear to be destroying evidence at the crash site and even looting the scene.
Russia, Ukraine and the Rebels are all denying any responsibility. Neither the Netherlands or Malaysia have the kind of military or diplomatic clout to pursue justice for their people.
worked on a surface-to-air guided missile system in the navy and we were generally led to believe that the basic intent of the warhead was to explode nearby (up to a few hundred feet away) the target and that the force of that explosion would be enough to bring the aircraft down. The one live exercise we did partake in resulted in a skin-to-skin hit, destroying the drone and wrecking an expensive piece of US Gov't property.
As others have said, it depends on the circumstances, but in most cases many of the passengers do know what's happening and how it's going to turn out for them. In this case, I think most of the passengers were fully aware of what was happening for some time after the missile detonated, and some of them may have been alive when the plane hit the ground.
The plane was apparently taken down by a Russian SA-11 surface-to-air missile, which is a radar-guided missile with a proximity fuse. The way that type of missile works is that the warhead detonates when it gets within a certain distance from its target, and the fragments strike the plane somewhat like a giant shotgun blast. The target is generally destroyed one of three ways - either the engine or flight control systems are too badly damaged for the plane to continue to operate, the fuel tanks explode, or the plane is so badly damaged that it is torn apart either by the speed of the plane or explosive decompression of the cabin.
From what I've read, it sounds as though this plane stayed together for some seconds after being hit, and that even after it came apart, some pieces were large enough that passengers could have still been alive inside. At 33,000 feet, they may have briefly lost consciousness from lack of oxygen, but the plane wasn't at 33,000 feet long enough for them to have totally blacked out. I suspect some of them were conscious when they hit the ground.
As a general answer to the question, unless the plane is totally destroyed in mid-air or is damaged at a high enough altitude to cause the plane to decompress, there will often - perhaps even usually - be at least some passengers who live long enough to know what's happening to them. One of the most horrifying examples of that is JAL 123, the 747 that crashed in 1985 after losing its rudder. The pilots fought for a half hour to regain enough directional control of the plane to aim it at a landing strip, but they failed, and eventually slammed into the side of a mountain.
Incredibly, 4 people managed to survive, but 520 were killed. The survivors told a chilling tale of that last half hour; the passengers were crying, weeping, even screaming hysterically, and many took the time to write goodbye notes to their loved ones and wrap them inside of wet towels to keep them from being burned in the crash. That's a pretty damned hard way to go, if you ask me.
I would like to think that in this particular tragedy death was almost instantaneous. Some of the crash scene photos coming out are horrific. In one photo a body has crashed through a roof into someone's bedroom.
Another sad aspect of this situation is that there will probably never be any punishment or reasonable compensation for the passenger's families. The Ukraine rebels appear to be destroying evidence at the crash site and even looting the scene.
Russia, Ukraine and the Rebels are all denying any responsibility. Neither the Netherlands or Malaysia have the kind of military or diplomatic clout to pursue justice for their people.
Could ask the survivors of the 1974 crash in the Andes, made famous by the book and two movies called "Alive!".
Another chilling account is the flight attendant on AA11 on 9/11/01 talking to someone and saying she can see Manhattan and that they are very low... and then just before impact she says "Oh my God" as if she realized what they were about to do.
On one extreme, there are situations like Air New Zealand flight 901 in 1979. This was a sightseeing tour over Antarctica. Apparently, an effective visual white-out result in a controlled flight into terrain - the terrain in question being Mount Erebus. The result was that there was no time for any drastic action to alarm the passengers. Everyone died on impact.
In that case, there would have been no realization from the passengers.
On the other hand, consider the case of Juliane Koepcke. On a flight over the Amazon in 1971, she describes bad turbulence, the plane going into a dive, and then after the aircraft broke up (at about 10,000') she describes free-falling and being aware of the sight of the jungle far below her. She then lost consciousness.
But she did survive with comparatively minor injuries and made it out after over a week alone in the rainforest.
Anyway, if you have hundreds of people on an aircraft that suffers some sort of catastrophic mid-air disaster, often the situation will be that by sheer numbers some people are going to survive long enough to have a very clear awareness that they're going down and unlikely to survive.
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