Can you survive a plane crash?

The public image of an aircraft accident is a total loss with nobody walking away, but that is a small minority of events. A long-running review of US airline accidents found that over 95 per cent of occupants survived, and that even in the subset classified as serious — with fire, severe damage or fatalities — around three quarters survived. The reason survivability is a design discipline is that most deaths in otherwise survivable accidents come afterwards, from smoke and fire during evacuation, which is why certification requires a full aircraft to be evacuable in 90 seconds using half the exits. That is also why the safety briefing focuses on brace position, exit counting and leaving belongings behind: those are the variables an occupant actually controls. Commercial aviation fatality rates per passenger-kilometre have fallen by more than an order of magnitude since the 1970s.

What changes the figure

• Counting rows to the nearest exit before takeoff is the intervention with evidence behind it
• The brace position reduces head and limb injury that would prevent self-evacuation
• Leaving cabin baggage behind is the difference between a 90-second evacuation and a much longer one

Survival rates compiled from published accident investigation statistics for scheduled airline operations; general aviation figures are very different.

Physiology, not instruction. Every figure here is a population range under particular conditions, and individual variation is large — temperature, exertion, fitness and health move all of them substantially. Nothing on this page is medical advice.

Situations

• How long do you have to escape a sinking car? Usually 30 seconds to a couple of minutes of floating — and the window is the way out, not the door.
• Can quicksand pull you under? No. Quicksand is roughly twice as dense as a human body, so you float — you sink to about waist depth and stop.
• How far from a nuclear blast do you have to be to survive? It scales with yield: for a one-megaton airburst, survival is unlikely within about 5 km and likely beyond about 10-12 km.
• How long can you survive in a hot car? Under an hour on a warm day for a child — the interior gains about 20 °C in the first ten minutes.
• How long does it take to drown? Under a minute to lose consciousness — and it is almost silent, which is why so many drownings happen in sight of others.
• What happens if a lift cable snaps? Essentially nothing — lifts hang from multiple ropes and have a speed-triggered brake that grips the rails.
• What height can you survive falling from? Survival is common below about 6 metres and rare above 20 — but people have survived falls from thousands.
• How likely are you to survive a shark attack? Very likely — of roughly 60 to 80 unprovoked bites worldwide each year, fewer than ten are fatal.
• What happens if you fall into lava? You would not sink — lava is about three times denser than a body — but you would not survive the heat either.
• What should you do if you are caught in a rip current? Rips pull you out, not under. Swim parallel to the beach until you are out of the flow, then come in.
• Could you survive inside a whale? You cannot be swallowed by almost any whale — their throats are too narrow — and a stomach offers no air.
• How long do you have to escape a burning house? Around three minutes from the alarm sounding in a modern furnished home.
• Can you survive a tsunami? Yes, by moving inland and uphill immediately — 30 centimetres of moving water can knock an adult off their feet.
• How long can you survive in a sealed container? Carbon dioxide becomes dangerous long before oxygen runs out — a few hours in a cubic metre of air.