Hours after a horrific looking airplane crash at San Francisco International Airport experts are breathing a sigh of relief that the death toll was so low. As of 10:00 pm EST two people had died in the crash of Asiana Airlines Flight 214 with 181 taken to hospitals with injuries, some in critical condition, with one person still unaccounted for, according to the Chicago Tribune.
As recently as twenty years ago the probability of the majority of passengers surviving a crash like that would have been extremely low. Aviation safety experts credit modern airplane design, especially the design of the Boeing 777 involved in today's crash, for learning from previous crashes and adapting to make planes safer than ever, according to USA Today.
"It's because of what we've learned from past accidents and that's due to great accident investigation techniques and taking what we've learned about what's failed about the structure of the airplane," Kevin Hiatt, CEO of the Flight Safety Foundation, told USA Today. "They hit very hard, they skidded down the runway and then into the dirt and then really rotated around. It's great design characteristics that kept everything intact on the airplane so that people could actually evacuate."
It the airplane had broken up upon impact the death toll would have been far higher. Since it was introduced 20 years ago the Boeing 777 has had a good safety record, today's crash marked the first fatalities in the plane's history. The most serious accident involving a Boeing 777 happened in 2009 when a British Airways flight crashed just short of Heathrow's airport leaving dozens injured but no one was killed, according to USA Today.
"We can generally say it's one of the safest airlines in the sky," Hiatt said of Asiana Airlines. "Other than that, this aircraft has got a great safety record. It's one of the safest airlines up there."
The aviation industry has done such a tremendous job of making commercial air travel safe that according to researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology air travel is safer than many other forms of transportation. With a fatality rate of 0.2 for every 1 million airline departures people have a greater chance of getting killed riding an escalator, according to USA Today.
"The statistics are such that commercial aviation is incredibly safe," John Hansman, an aerospace professor at MIT, told USA Today. "One of the ways that we do this is making the airplanes as crash-worthy as possible when you do have an incident like this, where there was apparently a problem on landing."
While the engineering of the plane played an enormous role in avoiding a catastrophic death toll in California it is important not to forget the role Asiana's flight crew likely played. The most important thing to do after a crash such as this is to get everyone off of the plane, which was on fire, as quickly as possible to minimize the possibility of fatalities.
"If people had dawdled getting off this airplane, that would have put them at increased risk," Hansman said.
