I’ve seen many posts like this in Russian media too. While the death toll is huge and the air carrier’s stock has plunged 3% down, there is a natural motivation for existence of social media fakes blaming passengers. Someone shared similar post on Facebook recently from an account that was created a few months ago and has posted only 3 meaningless picture shares ever since. Initially many media outlets did not even mention air carrier’s name in their stories covering the accident.

From multiple video sources it’s clear that the plane caught fire only after violent progressive bouncing on runway. The preceding events (lightning strike, partial radio loss, overweight landing) set up a stage for a disaster but hardly were direct causes of the fire.

Having been a private pilot for a while, we, pilots, are trained for emergencies. For example, my instructor routinely idles engine power without saying a word during flight reviews. On FAA practical test you are supposed to glide and land an airplane that lost power completely. Though I hope to never encounter engine loss in real life, I did dozens of practice approaches with zero power.

However passengers are never trained. This accident’s survivor witnessed that screams started after first bounce. When gear failed and fire ignited on second or third kick screams got louder. One couldn’t hear crew instructions in this mess. You can’t be sure you’d behave rationally until you’re there.

If we want extra safety we should train for rare situations like this. How many ditching incidents you can recall beyond Hudson miracle of 2009? Then why explain how to inflate a life vest every time on board. Shouldn’t we better teach passengers to leave their belongings, to crawl under smoke, to push other people out if they are unconscious? I would create a financial incentive for those travelers who undergone such a training and passed certain test.

Statistically, however, commercial flying today is much safer than traveling by car. In the US alone about 100 people are killed on the road every single day. So if we are optimizing for the number of souls lost during transportation, it is unclear what needs to be fixed with a top priority.