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Why do planes catch fire when they crash?

Why do airplanes so often catch fire on crashing? Because they are essentially flying gas tanks carrying well above 100,000 liters. Because jet engines are very, very hot.



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Some passengers may suffer permanent brain damage that prevents them from working or living independently. Broken bones. Even a so-called minor accident can cause extremely painful fractures in a passenger's hands, feet, arms, legs, or ribs. Back injuries.

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As the flight neared the line of massive thunderstorms straddling the Inter Tropical Convergence, any passenger who happened to be awake would probably have felt some light turbulence. Those looking out window would have watched the plane fly into a bank of clouds, then out into clear sky, and then back into clouds.

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The NTSB says that despite more people flying than ever, the accident rate for commercial flights has remained the same for the last two decades, and the survivability rate is a high 95.7 percent.

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However, statistically speaking, a seat close to an exit in the front or rear, or a middle seat in the back third of the plane offers the lowest fatality rate. That said, flying is still the safest form of transport.

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Most of the survivors were sitting behind first class, towards the front of the plane. Nonetheless, a TIME investigation that looked at 35 years of aircraft accident data found the middle rear seats of an aircraft had the lowest fatality rate: 28%, compared with 44% for the middle aisle seats.

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Of course, flying remains an incredibly safe way to travel. Commercial plane crashes are nowadays very rare, with approximately 45,000 flights typically completed each day in the US, all without fatality. That's a number that continues to rise, post Covid.

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Suicide by pilot is an aviation event in which a pilot deliberately crashes or attempts to crash an aircraft as a suicide act, with or without the intention of causing harm to passengers on board or people on the ground. If others are killed, it may be considered a type of murder–suicide.

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Pan Am Flight 1736 and KLM Flight 4805 On March 27, 1977, two Boeing 747 passenger jets collided on the runway at Los Rodeos Airport (now Tenerife North Airport), on the Spanish island of Tenerife, Canary Islands. The crash killed 583 people, making it the deadliest accident in aviation history.

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On average, there are 1,662 plane crashes per year. There are roughly 938 small plane crashes per year (planes under 12,500 lbs). Taxiing planes leads to 54 accidents, 4 deaths, and 24 accidents per year. There are up to 90,000,000 flight hours logged per year globally.

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[02:14:25] Robert: We are dead! [02:14:26] Dubois: Ten degrees of pitch! At 2:14 and 28.4 seconds, Air France Flight 447 crashes into the Atlantic Ocean with a final nose angle of 16.2 degrees, speed reading of 152 knots, and with a vertical speed of 10,912 feet per minute (which is roughly 102 knots).

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Families of victims and survivors may bring a lawsuit against the airline or aircraft. In some cases, it may be appropriate to sue a parts manufacturer. The federal government provides support to the families of those injured in airplane crashes.

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