How many lives have life-jackets on planes saved?
major_groove asked:
I’ve just got off a flight from Birmingham to Edinburgh. Considering this flight is mostly overland (if you forget the Firth of Forth), it seems strange that at least half of the safety briefing is about how to put the lifejacket on.
So while there are lots of statistics about how many plane crashes there are and how safe air travel is, I would like to know how many lives have ever been saved by those yellow life jackets? I’ll bet it’s very few.
I know that that plane might make journeys over water, but I meant for global air travel overall. I also appreciate that falling out of a plane from 13,000ft is not survivable even into water (unless you are the Hoff).
The assumption is that a plane will be able to crash land into a body of water in a controlled fashion that will allow the passengers to enetr the water and use the lifejackets to stay afloat until rescuers arrive. I doubt many people have ever survived a plane crash and thought, “few, if it hadn’t been for that life jacket I would have been screwed!”