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Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

One of the great things of the last ~25 years is the small n in regards to commercial aircraft fatalities. This report is dated 2015 but I wonder if it would be any different a decade later. In the prior 50 years, plane crashes were, maybe not common, but something you’d read about every month or so.

The only emergency landing I’ve been in where the crew briefed us on position and checked us was hands on the back of the seat in front. Luckily it wasn’t a crash and the fire was quickly contained on the ground. Turned out the shoe removal was the most inconvenient but perhaps the most useful (evacuation slides worked, but then we were on hot tarmac without shoes).

What astonished me the most was how everybody went along and didn’t complain. This was almost 35 years ago —- I wonder if that would still be the case. These days I have seen pictures of people sliding down the evacuation slides with hand luggage!

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I am not convinced about the wisdom of forbidding to take the hand luggage.

It is true that there are many people who have a big and awkward hand luggage or who need a very long time to recover their luggage from overhead.

There are also many other people who are able to recover their hand luggage from the overhead in less than a second and in much less time than most other passengers are able to just stand up.

I do not see why such passengers should be penalized, even if they would certainly not slow down the evacuation. Losing the documents and data from the hand luggage may cause very serious problems that could need many months of work for solving and passing through many unpleasant experiences until then.

The only argument against this that is correct, is that like in every other domain people would self-assess their own abilities too optimistically, so even those who are slow would believe that they can retrieve their luggage fast enough to not hinder the evacuation, but then they would be proven wrong.

Perhaps the passengers should pass a test of hand luggage retrieval speed, before the flight, in order to be pre-approved for keeping their hand luggage in the case of an emergency landing :-)

It’s not safe to bring down the slide. Going down the slide at all dangerous, people break legs every now and then. But even worse, the person in front of you really doesn’t want your hand luggage flying out of your grip and knocking them out (which can cause a lot of other problems)

That is true for a big case, but not for a backpack carried on the breast.

I agree that the retrieval of any bulky hand luggage should be forbidden.

Frankly, if in a rare life-or-death situation you care about your hand luggage, I'd recommend carefully reflecting on life choices and priorities.

Here, take my hand luggage and go! I'll stay behind..

Eh, I think this is a don't throw the baby out with the bathwater scenario.

You have way more time than you might expect after a plane crash. "Finally, [Captain] Sullenberger walked the cabin twice to confirm it was empty" [1]. If anybody had grabbed their hand luggage (especially from below their seat) they would've still had time to evacuate.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_Airways_Flight_1549#Ditchin...

Ah I see you like to generalize. This plane was lucky that it didn't burst into flames as soon as everyone exited or worse yet while they were still exiting.

> You have way more time than you might expect after a plane crash. "Finally, [Captain] Sullenberger walked the cabin twice to confirm it was empty" [1]. If anybody had grabbed their hand luggage (especially from below their seat) they would've still had time to evacuate.

But if they had taken their backpack or suitcase, and had dropped it, they could have blocked other people; knocked other people out; broken someone's ankle making them harder to evacuate etc etc.

And this was a calm evacuation. Imagine a fire, low visibility due to the smoke, the sense of urgency, and you trip on some dimwit's suitcase, pushing the people in front of you down, some of them hitting heads, then panic sets in, the path towards that emergency exit is blocked, etc etc etc.

Leave your fucking luggage behind. If everything is fine, it will get to you afterwards. If the plane is on fire, you won't, but you'd also not kill people by not taking it.

My question is: what could possibly be so important that you want to take it with you to have your hands full in an emergency potential life-or-death situation?

Uh, there's plenty of time to kill while you wait for the people ahead of you to deboard. Grabbing your phone isn't going to kill anybody.

Hell, even when there isn't plenty of time to kill grabbing your phone isn't going to kill anybody. [1]

You can phrase it as "important enough" all you want, but its really just why let an item to go waste unnecessarily.

[1]: https://youtu.be/CtmxTj9pKqg

Most phones aren't comparable to a bag, even a small bag.

Yeah, probably put your phone in your pocket if it's accessible. Keep your wallet in your pocket. If your wallet doesn't fit in your pocket, at least grab your id and payment cards, if they announce a rough landing while on approach and you have time to prepare a bit.

Different plane crashes are different.

When a Sukhoi Superjet 100 crash landed in Moscow, a fire broke out and fewer than half of the 78 occupants managed to escape the plane on time.

> Aeroflot claimed the evacuation took 55 seconds, though video evidence shows the slides still in use 70 seconds after their deployment. Passengers were seen carrying hand luggage out of the aircraft.

And you think that you're competent to determine whether there is sufficient time or not after the plane just crashed? If I were sitting in the row behind you, I'd much prefer you didn't.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeroflot_Flight_1492

It absolutely is. You have not seen the evacuation slides in person, they are NOT the fun water slides that you have in amusement parks.

You probably will lose grip on the backpack if you just carry it in your hands. And if you have straps behind your back, it's even worse because you can get tangled and delay others' evacuation.

I'm sure that less than second added a hundred times over can save some lives, plus in a tighter situation, bags behinds your back or in your hand will take up additional space that could accommodate another human.

The seconds are not added, because the corresponding activities are concurrent.

I am pretty sure that except for the people adjacent to the emergency exits, the others will have to wait their turn for a much longer time.

A backpack carried on the breast would not occupy space in which another human could have stayed.

There are multiple seats per row and only the first person of that row may benefit from the concurrency, as each person gets into the isle for that row they will add those seconds and that is sequential not concurrent. Also you likely haven't been in a trampling crowd situation, bag on a chest doesn't occupy zero space.

> A backpack carried on the breast would not occupy space in which another human could have stayed.

An individual backpack might not displace an individual human but across ~300 passengers those 50 backpacks will displace people.

As someone who has spent a lot of time defining and enforcing processes (yay), it is far easier and more understandable to adopt a hard rule for this sort of thing. You don't want people to be debating whether or not their backpack is the acceptable size to include, while someone else's laptop case is not. Then you have someone saying that they are allowed to take their backpack, but it is in the overhead bin one row behind them, so could you just pass it to me...

For life or death situations, you need to have short clear rules that are easy to follow.

Remember, you will only actually lose your stuff if the plane is destroyed. If the plane is in the middle of being destroyed, just get out and be glad you are still alive!

> it is far easier and more understandable to adopt a hard rule

Looking at this thread, we might need to put into regulation that taking baggage during an emergency evacuation is criminally negligent. (If someone behind you dies, negligent homicide.)

Agreed. This is your life at risk. This is the lives of others on the plane at risk.

Everything else takes a back seat to those priorities.

> The seconds are not added, because the corresponding activities are concurrent

A passenger has practically zero information as to the seriousness of the crash. It could be a doozy. Or there could be a fuel leak waiting to ignite.

> backpack carried on the breast would not occupy space in which another human could have stayed

You're claiming given two lines of people, one wearing backpacks, the other not, that the latter cannot be compressed more than the former?

The discriminant is the following question: what if everybody behaved like me?

Yes, this is first formulation of the “Categorical Imperative”, which asks individuals to act only according to that maxim whereby they can at the same time will that it should become a universal law. This ethical principle is a central concept in the moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant.

> Perhaps the passengers should pass a test of hand luggage retrieval speed, before the flight, in order to be pre-approved

Boarding.

It’s a shit show of people doing annoying stuff with their bags.

The idea that you could have some who can take their bags and some who can’t and that this would be acceptable to everyone is just not going to work. Combine this with the fact that a crisis alters people’s abilities. Some may be injured, some may be shocked. Then some poor crew member has to police the bs behaviour that would result.

This is life and death… absolute rule is better then “use your judgement” because plenty of people are gonna say “this 10 minute process is definitely just taking 1 second”

For the case I wrote about, on one side of the plane the ground crew was spraying foam on the wing and engines; everybody had to exit on the other side. FAA wants the entire plane emptied in 90 seconds.

In addition whatever you're carrying could injure you during decent (especially at the end - FAA is OK with people breaking ankles) or worse piece the chute. The crew came by and took everybody's shoes and stowed them in the overheads before they checked our brace positions. They also moved me and two other guys in our 20s into the exit row and ejected the three people already there.

Our cabin could have been full of smoke, or worse (luckily, it was not at all like that) and so do you think they want to try to explain a decision tree to a bunch of panicked passengers?

If you're really concerned about your valuables, wear them under your shirt, like a passport and card holder against pickpockets. If you're worried about losing data on your devices it's an easily solved problem to start backups today. I've had luck travelling this way against theft.

I hope we don't travel on the same aircraft.

> The only argument against this that is correct, is that like in every other domain people would self-assess their own abilities too optimistically, so even those who are slow would believe that they can retrieve their luggage fast enough to not hinder the evacuation, but then they would be proven wrong.

This is they key. Not only overestimating their speed in taking down the luggage, but also other passengers overestimating how much time they have to safely get off the plane.

Take Spantax Flight 995, for example. Almost everyone survived the initial crash landing, but dozens died from smoke inhalation. Most of those who died were seated in the rear of the plane, where there was traffic in the aisles due to one or two people grabbing luggage from the overhead bins. There is an account from a survivor from the rear of the plane who only managed to escape because he climbed over the seats to get around the traffic. Most other passengers in the area were content to wait, not realizing how quickly the smoke would spread and turn lethal.

> Losing the documents and data from the hand luggage may cause very serious problems that could need many months of work for solving and passing through many unpleasant experiences until then.

Rather go through the months of work solving problem and having unpleasant experiences than be dead.

And you can be confident anyone holding me up in an emergency for mere documents and papers is going to experience immediate unpleasantness that they aren't going to solve.

The fundamental problem is mis aligned incentives and consequences.

It’s really unlikely YOUR luggage will impact YOur escape much at all, at worst you can abandon it at almost any point.

The consequence of injury will be for those around you, and possible delay for people behind you. But not really YOU.

For “important papers” I suspect there is some evaluation of how much they are willing to risk the lives of those other people at the back of the plane.

Rule should be if you bring your luggage you are handcuffed to the plane until the last person leaves. I think in older times you would have more severe consequences.

Those many months and bad experiences won’t matter if you are dead.

And if it doesn’t look like a life-or-death situation, then you can come back later to retrieve the luggage. There is absolutely no reason to carry it during an emergency, period.

> I am not convinced about the wisdom of forbidding to take the hand luggage.

Famous last words. /s

Telemetry does not slow down the program. It is only one network access.

And so on, and so forth.

In addition to the problem of slow retrieval by some causing a delay for everyone, we have congestion in the aisles from items much less important than people, additional trip hazards, and hazards to people and the slide itself on exiting.

I’ve been through training of smoke in aircraft, and it’s total chaos without adding things to trip over.

Airplanes contain a myriad of toxic-when-burned compounds, and death from smoke inhalation within the sealed tube of a fuselage is a matter of seconds.

There should be a switch in the cockpit that automatically locks all overhead bins if the pilots anticipate an evacuation. This information should be given to the passengers during the pre flight briefing.

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