Toronto’s Pearson International Airport witnessed a plane crash yesterday, and believe it or not good news can be found in this.
Every passenger and crew member survived the crash!! This is the first time I’ve heard of a jetliner crashing and exploding into a fireball in which all persons aboard came out alive.
Editor’s note: This is also the first entry into our newest category Spin da News. This new category will explore the positive side of things in the news that are normally deemed to be negative.
This truly was an incredible event. I was on my way back to Toronto from London heading eastbound on the 401 less than 24 hours before it happened.
Talk about close to home. sheesh.
I agree that this plane crash is an incredible event indeed. In fact it intrigued me so much to hear that all of the passengers survived this ordeal that I looked into the actual odds of surviving a plane crash at all. Much to my suprise the odds are not as dreary as one might think. According to the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board out of 568 plane crashes from 1983 through 2000, only 71 resulted in at least one fatality. Some 95.7 percent of the passengers survived those accidents! This means out of 51,207 occupants there were only 2,280 fatalities! This actually gives me renewed faith that those 15 minutes of boring “in case of emergency” instructions we are given before every flight might well save our lives one day!
This was also the first time that an A340 airbus has ever crashed, and when you consider that Air France is one of the largest airlines in terms of revenue each year, those are some pretty great odds!!! I think the real bottom line here is that you can never account for the weather in any situation. And thank goodness everyone survived!!!!!
You can take a look here http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/08/02/survivable.crashes
for more info on the survivibilty of such catastrophic events.