Latest news with #airplanecrash
CBC
15 hours ago
- CBC
WATCH — Is seat 11A really the safest seat on an airplane?
Flying is still the safest mode of transport, experts say CONTENT WARNING: This story contains information about people dying in plane crashes. Consider reading it with a trusted adult. It's common to have an emotional reaction to the news. Is there really a 'safest seat' on an airplane? On June 12, an Air India flight crashed minutes after takeoff in the Indian city of Ahmedabad. Several people on the ground died, along with 241 on board. One passenger survived. Why kids should still feel safe to fly despite deadly D.C. plane crash Vishwashkumar Ramesh was that sole survivor, and was sitting in seat 11A. He jumped through a nearby emergency exit after the crash. So why has seat 11A gone viral online? Turns out Thai singer and actor James Ruangsak Loychusak — who was one of the survivors of a deadly 1998 Thai Airways plane crash — sat in the same seat. 'That was an uncanny coincidence,' he told India's The Telegraph Online after the crash. 'The kind that gives you goosebumps.' CBC Kids News was not able to confirm that he was actually sitting in seat 11A, but it turns out it may not really matter. Check the video below to find out more about seat 11A from CBC Kids News contributor Ainara Alleyne. ⬇️⬇️⬇️ Why your seat choice doesn't really matter Aviation experts say plane crashes are random, and any seat can improve your survivability depending on the unique aspects of a crash. These include things like the way the aircraft breaks apart, the type of impact, where someone is sitting and timing, for example. All about airplanes: Aviation experts answer kids' questions about flying 'Each accident is different, and it is impossible to predict survivability based on seat location,' Mitchell Fox, a director at Flight Safety Foundation, a U.S.-based non-profit, told Reuters. Two men in plane crashes more than 20 years apart both survived sitting in seat 11A. On the left is the recent crash involving a Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner aircraft in Ahmedabad, India. The image on the right depicts the 1998 crash of a Thai Airways Airbus A310 in Surat Thani, Thailand. Image credit: (Adnan Abidi/Reuters, and Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty Images) Also, seat 11A isn't in the same spot on every airplane and may not always be as close to an emergency exit. That being said, experts say sitting near an emergency exit can improve chances of evacuation in less severe crashes. In any case, don't let all this talk of crashes scare you — flying is still by far the safest mode of transportation. You're more likely to be struck by lightning than end up in a plane crash, experts say. Have more questions? Want to tell us how we're doing? Use the 'send us feedback' link below. ⬇️⬇️⬇️ With files from Natalie Stechyson/CBC News
Yahoo
21 hours ago
- General
- Yahoo
Airplane crash-lands in Wisconsin lake, pilot rescued by witness
DANIELS, Wis. (WFRV) – The FAA is investigating an airplane crash in northwestern Wisconsin after a plane crash-landed in a lake on Wednesday afternoon. The Burnett County Sheriff's Office posted about the incident on its Facebook page, saying dispatch got a call around 3:15 p.m. on June 18 reporting that an airplane had crashed into Mud Hen Lake in the Town of Daniels. WisDOT shares the importance of burn management When authorities arrived, the pilot had already safely gotten out of the plane and was on a pontoon after being rescued by a Good Samaritan. Deputies say that the pilot was the only occupant in the airplane. The pilot of the 1979 Cessna U206G was identified as a 79-year-old man from Hudson. The FAA is reportedly investigating the crash. No additional information was provided. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
CNN
2 days ago
- General
- CNN
NTSB investigators find San Diego jet was flying too low on its descent path before fiery crash
Federal agencies Air travel safety Airplane crashesFacebookTweetLink Follow The private jet that crashed into a San Diego neighborhood last month was too low on its descent path for more than a mile before clipping power lines less than 100 feet above the ground, National Transportation Safety Board investigators said Wednesday. The new findings are part of a preliminary report from the NTSB on the fiery May 22 crash that killed all six on board including music agent Dave Shapiro, who was piloting the Cessna Citation jet, and famed rock drummer Daniel Williams. The crash occurred before sunrise in thick fog and low visibility as the overnight flight from Teterboro, New Jersey, was lining up to land at Montgomery-Gibbs Executive Airport. Newly released data from the NTSB shows the jet reached a prescribed descent point roughly 3 miles from the runway already too low, then the plane continued to descend to a mere 60 feet above ground level. The preliminary report does not specify why the flight was too low on the approach path. Investigators say they are still analyzing the plane's cockpit voice recorder. NTSB investigators found parts of the plane's tail near 90- to 95-foot-high power transmission lines, which they classified in the report as the 'first identified point of contact.' The main parts of the wreckage, including the passenger cabin and left wing, came to rest in a neighborhood street about a quarter of a mile away, the NTSB said. Nobody on the ground was seriously hurt by the impact, though the NTSB said eight people on the ground received minor injuries. Compounding problems, the airport's automatic weather reporting system was out of service, causing air traffic controllers to relay to Shapiro the conditions at the nearby Marine Corps Air Station Miramar some four miles away. The NTSB noted part of the airport's lighting system that helps guide pilots in low visibility approaches was out of service since 2022. The report does not find a probable cause, which is due in a final report typically published within two years of the crash. Correction: A previous version of this story gave the wrong day for the release of the NTSB report. It was released Wednesday.
The Guardian
13-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘She was a wonder': relatives mourn victims of Air India plane crash
As he dropped off his only daughter at Ahmedabad airport on Thursday morning, Suraj Mistry seized the opportunity to take one final family selfie before she went back to London. Kinal Mistry, 24, had laughed lovingly at her father as he made her firmly promise that they would meet again soon. 'Yes, Daddy, very soon,' she said. Instead, the photo – of Kinal smiling beside her mother and father – would commemorate the last time his family was a whole. In scenes of horror that have since reverberated around the world, just a few minutes after the flight took off from the runway of Ahmedabad airport, it plummeted from the sky, exploding in an inferno of fire and black smoke. Only one of the 242 people onboard survived. Yet even as fragmented bodies and charred limbs continued to be uncovered by rescue teams from the site of the crash, Mistry could not bring himself to accept that Kinal – whom he described as a beautiful dancer 'so full of life' – was among the dead. Like so many on board, her body had yet to be identified, let alone given back to the family. Sitting in the Civil hospital in Ahmedabad, still in the same clothes he wore when he took his daughter to the airport, Mistry was among hundreds of families desperately waiting for answers and clinging to diminishing hope. 'What can I say about Kinal? She was a wonder,' said Mistry, as he began to cry. 'She lit up every room with her smile, she could strike up a friendship with anyone. She was beautiful, inside and out. That's just who she was.' Her life was only just beginning, he said. She had just got married and moved to London last year where she worked as a choreographer and had also set up a food business out of her own kitchen, as 'she loved nothing more than feeding people'. He said: 'In just one day, our whole world has fallen apart. I don't know if it makes me foolish, but I'm still hoping. Hoping for a miracle. Please, just one miracle.' The true scale of the tragedy was still unfolding on Friday, as images and accounts of those who were onboard Air India flight 171 began to gradually trickle out and the true death toll – officially about 265 – still remained unclear. The government Civil hospital in Ahmedabad appeared overwhelmed with the scale of bodies in the morgue and the task of identifying them, with only about six returned to families by Friday. More than 200 relatives flocked to a makeshift centre in the hospital medical college to give DNA samples to help identify the bodies, many which were brought to the hospital morgue mangled beyond recognition. Officials said some had been reduced almost to ash. What was clear was that the disaster had wrought untold devastation on hundreds of families across India and the UK. Prateek Joshi, a radiologist who worked at a hospital in Derby, had boarded the flight with his wife, Komi Vyas, also a doctor, and their three children, ready for the whole family to start their new life together in the UK. In their excitement, they all crammed into one final photo together just before takeoff; mother and father beaming in the foreground, their five-year-old twin sons Nakul and Pradyut and their eight-year-old daughter Miraya smiling from the seats in the next aisle. For another passenger, Sahil Salim Ibrahim Patel, from a small village in Gujarat, this was his first ever international flight, en route to London for a dream scholarship that he believed would change his family's life forever. Meanwhile, Prakash Lal Minarhia, who had been working as a chef in London for 15 years, had come back to India to perform the rituals for the recent death of his father. Minarhia's relatives said they still had not been able to bring themselves to inform his mother and wife, who remained in their village, about the crash. 'Until we have his body, nothing is certain,' said Uday Lal Minarhia, 48, a farmer. Rescuers and forensic teams continued to scour the wreckage on Friday amid scorching temperatures. Naresh Soni, an officer from the National Forensic Sciences University, said the teams were 'not only racing against time, but also intense heat. With each passing hour in these extreme temperatures, the risk of biological sample degradation and contamination rises sharply – possibly making the identification of bodies difficult and potentially unreliable.' As it crashed to the ground, the plane collided with a residential hostel housing hundreds of medical students, who were studying at the nearby medical college. Many were eating lunch when the 227-tonne plane smashed down, obliterating the canteen wall and killing at least five students, with at least 50 more injured. Yet many who had been in the vicinity of the hostel – which stood blackened and ominously empty on Friday – still remained missing, yet to be counted among the official dead. As Anita Ben Thakur arrived at the crash site, which was cordoned off by police, she demanded to be let through the barricades. 'Let me through, let me through, my mother is inside,' she pleaded with police, before breaking down in tears. Her mother, Sarla Ben, had been the cook in the hostel canteen for the past 15 years and had been serving food to the student doctors at Thursday lunchtime. She had also brought her two-year-old granddaughter to work with her. Neither have been seen since. 'Since yesterday, I've been trying to find my mother, but I've failed miserably,' she said. 'I've running around the entire night, and waiting outside the hospital patiently, hoping for some news – but nothing. And now, they're not even allowing us near the debris to look for her ourselves.' Sitting on the pavement outside the hospital morgue, Suresh Bhai Patni, 39, a rickshaw driver, put his head in his hands. On Thursday afternoon, as he did most days, his 15-year-old son Aakash Patni had gone to deliver lunch to his mother at the tea stall she ran, situated just outside the student hostel. The family would meet at the stall every evening. At the moment his mother, Sita Devi, sat down to eat, and Aakash was watching over the tea, the plane hit the hostel and immediately engulfed the stall in flames. Devi ran towards the stall in an attempt to save her son, and was caught up in the fire, but to no avail. Aakash's charred corpse was later recovered by the authorities. Devi survived but is seriously ill with burns over more than half of her body. 'She keeps asking me about Aakash, but I just tell her he is also being treated,' said Patno. 'How do I tell her the truth? I'm afraid she'll lose the will to survive. And I can't afford to lose her too. Not now. Not after this.' Yet among the grief, many clung to what they saw as a single miracle to emerge from the tragedy; the sole survivor, 38-year-old British-Indian Vishwash Kumar Ramesh. Still confined to a hospital bed, he had only bruises and scratches to show for the incident. Speaking to the Indian state broadcaster, the only outlet allowed into the hospital ward on Friday, Ramesh still remained hazy about how he had survived, but it appeared he had jumped out of the emergency exit door. 'I still can't believe how I got out alive,' he said.
The Independent
13-06-2025
- General
- The Independent
‘Why me?': Six extraordinary stories of sole plane crash survivors after British man walks away from India Air disaster
The sole survivor of the Air India plane crash that killed more than 240 people somehow walked from the wreckage of the aircraft after it crashed in the city of Ahmedabad. Ramesh Viswashkumar, who was in seat 11A near the emergency exit, and managed to escape through the broken hatch. He was filmed after Thursday's disaster limping on the street in a blood-stained T-shirt with bruises on his face. The Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner had plummeted soon after take-off and erupted in a ball of fire, killing everyone else onboard. As extraordinary as it seems, the 40-year-old Briton's miraculous escape isn't the first story of a sole airplane crash survivor. There have been dozens of stories shared, from as far back as 1929, when 34-year-old Lou Foote survived a crash killing 14 others in Newark, New Jersey. But despite escaping brushes with death, the reality of such lucky escapes is often complicated. More recent survivors, while celebrated in the media, have spoken of life-long feelings of guilt and sorrow following their escapes. Here we take a look at six survivor stories: Yugoslav Airlines Flight 367 When: 26 January 1972 Who: Vesna Vulovic 'Whenever I think of the accident, I have a prevailing, grave feeling of guilt for surviving it and I cry.' For Serbian air stewardess Vesna her survival onboard the fateful Yugoslav Airlines to Zagreb haunted her for the rest of her life. Vesna's broken body was found among the wreckage after the aircraft, travelling from Copenhagen, fell into woods near Srbská Kamenice in the former Czechoslovakia, killing 23 passengers and four crew. Vensa, who fell 33,300 ft without a parachute, was paralysed from the waist down but, after two operations, she learned to walk again just a year after the crash. Yugoslav officials claimed separatists from a Croatian fascist movement, the Ustashi, had planted the bomb on the plane, which blew it up in the sky. But while Vesna became a Serbian heroine, she went on to live a secluded life. Back in 2012, The Independent interviewed her from her dilapidated flat in Belgrade, where she shared the struggles of many Serbs in harsh economic conditions. 'I don't know what to say when people say I was lucky ... life is so hard today," she said. She passed away more than 40 years after the crash, in 2016 aged 66. Northwest Airlines Flight 255 When: August 16, 1987 Who: Cecelia Cichan, aged four 'I remember feeling angry and survivor's guilt,' said Cecelia, when she looked back on the crash which killed her parents and her brother, along with 153 other people. 'Why didn't my brother survive? Why me?' she told CNN. Now 41, Cecelia, who cannot remember the crash, says she bears a tattoo on her wrist of an airplane 'as a reminder of where I come from'. Then aged just four, Cecelia Cichan was travelling home to Tempe, Arizona alongside her mother, father and six-year-old brother. Tragedy stuck when the left wing clipped a light pole after takeoff. The aircraft rolled 90 degrees left and sheared the top off a rental car building before crashing into a busy road where it went up in flames. While searching the wreckage, firemen found Cichan still strapped into her seat, having sustained third-degree burns and fractures to her skull, collarbone and left leg. Firefighters discovered Cecelia still strapped into her seat among the wreckage. She suffered sustained third-degree burns and fractures to her skull, collarbone and left leg. LANSA Flight 508 When: 24 December 1971 Who: Juliane Koepcke, aged 17 When Juliane Koepcke and her mother Maria boarded LANSA Flight 508 from Lima to Pucallpa in Peru they were angry at the flight already being seven hours late. Nevertheless, they were looking forward to reuniting with their father and husband for the Christmas holidays in 1971. But the aircraft was hit by lightning mid-air, causing a fire on the right wing which then fell off. As the plane dived down into the Peruvian rainforest, Juliane found herself outside the aircraft in a freefall, dropping 10,000ft still strapped to her seat. She fell unconscious before waking up the next day with a broken collarbone and cuts to her legs. Fourteen other people, out of the 92 on board, survived the crash but died while awaiting rescue. Among them was her mother. Juliane later told the BBC: 'I found out that she [Maria Koepcke] also survived the crash but was badly injured and she couldn't move. She died several days later. I dread to think what her last days were like.' When: 30 June 2009 Who: Bahia Bakari, aged 12 Young Bahia Bakari could hardly swim, said her father. But she managed to cling on to aeroplane wreckage in the sea for 13 hours before rescue after an Airbus A310-324 crashed off the north coast of Grande Comore, Comoros in 2009. The plane had taken off from Sana'a in Yemen when it came down around 1.50am. Close to landing on the island nation in the Indian Ocean, French aviation investigators found that errors by the crew on the flight commands brought the plane into a stall over the sea. Other factors were a lack of training for the crew and windy conditions. Onboard the flight was 153 people, including 66 French nationals and Bahia's mother. Yet despite the crash, Bahia said it has not prevented her from flying again. 'I tell myself there's little chance it will happen to me a second time," she told France 3. Describing the crash, she said: 'We were told that we were going to land and there were jolts in the plane. No one seemed worried. Before the crash, my mother just said to me 'Did you fasten your seatbelt?'" Afriqiyah Airways Flight 771 Who: Ruben van Assouw, aged nine Date: 12 May 2010 One of the youngest sole survivors of a plane crash, Ruben van Assouw was returning from a safari holiday with his family in South Africa when their Airbus A330-200 crashed. The plane, which was heading from Johannesburg, South Africa to Tripoli, Libya, came down just short of the stopover airport runway in the Libyan capital of Tripoli in 2010. The child suffered leg fractures, but remained in a stable condition despite the aircraft hitting the ground with such force that smouldering shards of metal were thrown half-a-mile from the point of impact. He was discovered some way from the crashed aircraft, semi-conscious and still strapped in his aeroplane seat. Reuben lost his parents and his brother in the crash. In total, 103 passengers and crew died, including UK, French and US nationals. Despite reports the boy was subsequently looked after by his aunt and uncle, little is known about him since. Four years ago, a book was published, called Dear Edward, that was partially based on his crash survivor story. Global Air Flight 0972 Who: Mailen Diaz Almaguer, aged 19 When: 18 May 2018 Teenager Mailen Diaz Almaguer was on a domestic flight flight from the Cuban capital Havana with her husband when it crashed shortly after take-off in 2018. Eyewitnesses said they saw one of the plane's engines on fire before it disappeared behind trees and crashed into a field, according to the New York Times. Onboard was 105 people, including at last five children, according to reports. The plane had been headed to Holguin, Cuba. Three passengers were sent to Calixto Garcia Hospital alive, but only Mailen Diaz Almaguer survived. During 70 days of treatment to save her life, her left leg was amputated. In the years since, the young woman, who now lives in Havana having bought a home with the compensation she received, has shared updates on her recovery. She said she relied on her Christian faith to overcome physical and mental challenges caused by the crash.
