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Comment by rurban | Hacker News Reader

How big are the chances that the most prominent passenger is the sole survivor of a plane crash (yet, but I don't expect many more)? The Bank of Panjab president, whow! Lucky guy.

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Decent, given that the current fatality count is 11 out of 91 passengers and an unspecified number of crew.

Certainly the fatality count will rise, but with modern planes survival tends to be more about escaping the post crash fire. If >50% of the passengers and crew live, I wouldn’t be surprised at all.

I'd expect a lower survival rate as it appears to have crashed into buildings, and not into a field or similar.

Crashing in a city means that you crash into buildings that are both flammable and hinder escape, as you’ve said. But it also means that you’re crashing near a means of rescue, rather than having to wait precious minutes for rescue services to locate you. Only time will tell which of these factors was more important.

Good news is that crashes on landing tend to involve a lot less fuel, which should improve survival chances significantly.

I read this earlier today and was hopeful that fatality count would be low. Just shocked to see a final count of 2 survivors total.

There is no information that he is sole survivor. There is no information about how many survivors there are exactly.

Is he really lucky? Any person taking part in plane crash is unlucky in my view. Also "survived" does not yet mean he is unhurt.

The subset of people who are on an airplane at any point in time generally skews heavily prominent. Especially more so when you subtract almost 100% of tourists from the equation.

That might be sampling bias - how many people do you know that fly around these days? (Corona, lockdown and all)

There are 40 survivors reported in local media.

Even if it was the case I wouldn't draw any "conspiracy" conclusions from it. As part of a demanding CEO role he may of be quite physically fit, or maybe he just had the whole of business class to himself.

My understanding is that the front of a plane is usually more survivable in a crash. Usually crashes are tail-first, and the back is closer to the engines / gas to star with. (pilots are generally trying to pull up at the time of a crash, so the nose is up and tail is down).

So yeah, if he was in business class, I don't think it'd be crazy for that to boost his survival odds (assuming anyone does survive).

That is not correct. The back of the plane is slightly safer based on historical data, largely due to the tendency of the front of the plane to break off during a crash landing. [0]

If the pilot is still pulling up when the plane contacts the ground, then you’re probably talking about an extremely high speed crash, where no seat is safe. The types of crashes you need to analyze for seat specific survivability are things like runway excursions and relatively level landings onto fields or bodies of water.

O: https://youtu.be/kJZ1eHU_JZg

If so, it would be a reverse conspiracy. The conspiracy folks certainly would come to weird conclusions if he would have died. And prominent folks usually sit in the front rows, the most insecure places in a plane.

But I wrote that idea very early after the crash. I didn't expect that so many survived a plane crash, even into 4 houses. Now it became clear that many survived. Almost a miracle to me. Very lucky.

My initial idea was some dust in the engines, because that was the very first flight after the lockdown. Bad maintenance.

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