How to survive an air crash

Torrential rain was pounding the tarmac as the 179 passengers waiting for take-off on a night flight to Los Angeles felt their jumbo jet creak and shudder alarmingly. It was being buffeted by typhoon winds that were gusting at up to 90mph. Businessman John Diaz, 50, had been tracking Typhoon Xangsane on his laptop computer all day. Staring anxiously out of the tiny, rain-streaked cabin window into the pitch dark, Diaz reckoned it was now directly overhead.

Other international flights out of Taipei Airport in Taiwan had been cancelled. Diaz couldn't believe his own - Singapore Air flight 006 - would be allowed to go ahead. 'I asked at the counter, and four or five times in the lounge, whether the flight was going to take off,' Diaz remembers. 'I asked all the way up to boarding the plane.'

He sought final reassurance from a cabin stewardess as he took his seat in first class. 'She said: "Oh, no problem" - but you could see the worry in her eyes.'

At 11.09pm on October 31, 2000, the jumbo was cleared for departure and taxied towards the runway. 'The visibility was nil,' recalls Diaz, still incredulous three years on. 'You had no idea where you were.'

In fact, the plane had turned on to the wrong runway - one that had been closed because it was under repair. A minute later, just as it lifted off at 180 mph, it collided with cranes and construction equipment.

The consequences were instant and catastrophic. One crane sliced off the plane's left wing, sending it into a nosedive. The aircraft broke into three parts on impact and burst into flames, killing 83 passengers and crew as a fireball devoured the cabin.

'It was like Dante's Inferno,' says Diaz. 'There were burning bodies in the seats. I saw a man completely on fire a few feet away - with a look on his face not of agony or fear, but more like wonder.'

Diaz did not realise it, but he had less than three minutes to escape - or die. According to Aircrash, a fascinating new documentary series which starts on Channel Four tonight, passengers who do not get out of a burning cabin during that tiny sliver of time invariably perish.

Other than the impact itself, fire and smoke are the main killers in air crashes. Fuel can account for one third of an aircraft's total weight and, once ignited, it takes 90 seconds to burn through the average plane's 15 cmthick fuselage.

Survivors of some of the world's most devastating air disasters have contributed to the documentary, which provides some chilling facts.

Young men are the most likely to emerge from the wreckage alive, with the elderly and young children least likely to make it. And 12 per cent of passengers who survive the impact will nevertheless die because they are paralysed by shock.

Across the world, plane crashes claim the lives of 1,300 people a year - and after each disaster we are reassured by experts that flying is a comparatively safe way to travel.

They say that the chances of dying in an air crash are 800million to one and that every year, three times as many people die in car accidents in Britain as die in air disasters across the globe.

But how safe you feel depends on whose statistics you believe. In his book on air safety, The Tombstone Imperative, journalist Andrew Weir points out that the airlines' reassuring safety figures measure fatalities against distance travelled.

He claims that measuring fatal accidents against the number of journeys made produces a more telling figure - it turns out that you are 12 times more likely to die in a plane than in a car.

Weir also argues that airlines could do more to maximise the survival chances in crashes, but that they put profit before investment in water sprinklers, smoke hoods and wider access to exits.

His tips for survival include choosing a seat over the wing because it is the strongest part of the plane, having your own smoke hood at hand, and always travel with a major airline.

The arguments for sprinklers and smoke hoods were vigorously made in the aftermath of the 1985 Manchester air disaster, in which 55 of the 137 passengers on a Corfu-bound Airtours plane were killed after an engine disintegrated during take-off. Most of the passengers died from inhaling toxic fumes when fire broke out.

Weir argues that airlines have not done enough since then to improve passengers' chances of surviving an air disaster. Small wonder, then, that plane crashes - and the stories of those who cheat death in them - hold such fascination for us.

John Diaz should have died on impact that October night in Taipei. The crane that took off the plane's wing also made a three-foot gash in the fuselage right where he was sitting. Burning fuel immediately roared in through the hole.

Diaz escaped being burned alive only because his seat unbolted when the plane hit the ground, throwing him to the other side of the cabin. But he still had to find a way through the thick smoke and the shower of burning fuel flying round the cabin, 'exploding like napalm' on contact with skin.

'Everything was melting,' he says. 'Video screens were melting in front of our eyes. The kitchen looked like something out of a Dali painting. The explosions were huge, but oddly I don't remember any sound from the minute the plane hit the ground.'

Diaz's brain shifted into a strange gear during the ordeal. 'My mind was amazing,' he says. 'It didn't go into slow motion. Everything became crystal clear. I started thinking in parallel fashion. It seemed as if a hundred different "me's" were thinking about my children, my mother, my dad.'

He even found himself worrying about what his wife would say if he left his new briefcase behind on the plane. Using the bag to shield his face, Diaz reached the emergency exit. Other passengers were struggling to open the heavy door. Diaz helped force it open, and found himself tumbling outside to safety.

Later, at the local hospital, the horror continued. Diaz cannot forget one particular passenger. 'He was walking around, burned from head to foot,' he says. 'His body looked like a blister. He had no hair anywhere. Amazingly, he was telling everyone he was perfectly alright. I believe he died.'

Diaz contrasts his horrific experience with the comforting safety 'rituals' that airlines have created to make us feel confident about flying.

Ultimately, he says, crashes confirm our worst fears: man isn't meant to fly. In fact, most crashes - 70 per cent - take place during take-off and landing, usually within one mile of an airport. Bad weather is also a factor in 20per cent of crashes.

Like John Diaz, former military pilot Joe Stiley was worried about the weather as he waited at a snow-bound Washington National Airport on January 13, 1982, for a flight to Florida.

Stiley, then 44, didn't want to be at the airport that day. It was his son's 12th birthday and he wanted to be at home.

After being delayed in the terminal, passengers sat on the plane for two hours while a snowstorm raged. The plane had already been de-iced once. And while it was being de-iced for a second time, the pilot announced he had been given departure clearance.

The de-icing was promptly abandoned and in that moment, the plane's fate was decided.

Ice which had accumulated on the engine pressure probes resulted in false readings being sent to the cockpit. And as the aircraft accelerated down the runway, Stiley realised something was very wrong. He was sitting beside his assistant, Nikki Felch. 'I was saying: "Geez, we're nowhere near the kind of speed that we need,"' he recalls.

'I knew we were in trouble. The plane was shuddering. Then the left wing went down, and we went with it.'

This time, freezing water rather than fire was the killer. The plane, with 79 passengers and crew, crashed into the ice-covered Potomac River.

Stiley remembers the deafening boom as the plane hit the water. 'I remember saying: "God help me," then I felt myself black out.'

The plane came to rest on the riverbed, and water quickly rose through the cabin. It was lapping just beneath Stiley's nostrils when he regained consciousness.

Stiley and Felch had broken legs, but he managed to get his feet out from under the crushed seats, then pulled Nikki out.

They swam to the back of the plane, bumping into seats in which dead and dying passengers were still strapped.

Somehow, they found a way out and made it to the surface. But the trauma was not over. Only five passengers, including Stiley and Felch, got out of the plane. In agonising pain, they struggled to stay afloat in freezing water.

It was 25 minutes before a helicopter arrived. And even then, the rescue was treacherously difficult.

The helicopter dropped a ladder and they were dragged through the water towards the shore, crashing against huge blocks of ice in the river. Stiley broke all his ribs.

'When I got to hospital, my body temperature was so low I should have been dead,' he says. Thoughts of his son kept him alive. He did not want him remembering his own birthday as the day his father died.

The cabin crew played no part in the survival of John Diaz and Joe Stiley. They didn't get a chance. But research shows that well-trained crew can be the most crucial factor in passenger survival, particularly during a mid-air crisis.

Explosions in the air are the stuff of movies, but in reality are rare.

Stewardess Laura Brentlinger, 52, had been working in the air for 17 years before she experienced one.

A jumbo flight from Hawaii to New Zealand on February 24, 1989, with 356 passengers and crew on board, was 17 minutes out of Honolulu when a tremendous hissing filled the cabin. Then there was a huge explosion.

After Lockerbie, many passengers and crew assumed the blast at 23,000ft was a terrorist bomb. Suddenly, a gale was howling through the cabin and the temperature had dipped below zero. Debris was flying everywhere.

'I had the sensation of huge suction, like a big vacuum cleaner trying to suck you out the aircraft,' Brentlinger says.

She found herself clutching the spiral staircase to the upper deck, her feet off the ground. Passengers said later that she looked like a flag on a pole.

For a terrifying 25 seconds, the plane was in a nosedive before the pilot regained control. 'That's when I saw the hole,' says Brentlinger. 'One side of the business-class cabin was gone. The seats were missing and the people who had been sitting in them were gone.'

Brentlinger's realisation gave way to a moment of strange peace. 'I remember looking out through the hole and seeing the sky, stars and the ocean below. It was a beautiful sight. But the horror of it was beyond words.

'There were people crying. I saw rosaries come out. But unlike in the movies, people were not screaming. It was almost surreal. Couples were holding hands and kissing each other. They were saying goodbye.'

Against all the odds, the captain managed to turn the plane back to Honolulu and land safely. But nine passengers had been sucked out to their deaths.

Later, it was discovered that a cargo door had opened, causing an explosive decompression.

All the survivors of air crashes are scarred by the experience. For Joe Stiley, who somehow made it out of the Potomac River, the physical damage is most obvious. He remains crippled by his injuries.

John Diaz, who saw so many burn to death at Taipei, says it is the mental anguish that lingers. 'There's a part of me that still feels I died on that plane, and that this is some last-minute dream,' he says. 'The man I saw burning is still etched on my memory. He follows me, he is everywhere.'

What often obsesses survivors is why they made it when others did not. Brentlinger's nine passengers had no chance to save themselves and she says the tragedy changed her for ever.

'I'll have a passenger now who is upset,' she says. 'They didn't get their meal, or their preferred seat. I think to myself: "You don't know how fortunate you are to be alive. You are sitting in an aluminum tube and there's only six inches between you and death."

'I feel I'm in a different world when I hear people complaining about things that aren't important. The thing that's important is life. What's more precious than that?'