Many lives saved in airplane crash thanks to improved testing and safety materials

While heroic actions by its passengers contributed, the low amount of deaths caused by the crash of Asiana Airlines Flight 214 in San Francisco was likely due to improved testing and safety enhancements in the aircraft industry.

Aviation-safety experts, according to the Wall Street Journal, said the toll of dead and injured of the crash was highly reduced by jet makers, airlines and regulators’ efforts to make air travel safer than ever. Flame-retardant materials and seats designed to withstand the force of an airplane crash were cited as examples of improvements that may have saved lives.

In the late 1980s, regulators created a mandate to ensure new passenger planes’ seats could withstand stronger impacts than in the past, which was mandated to nearly all crafts’ interiors by October 2009. Additionally, though a fast-moving fire engulfed much of the plane’s cabin in flames less than a half-hour after the crash, fire-resistant seats and materials likely bought passengers enough time to safely disembark.

The crash was “the culmination of what has been done over more than 20 years to help more and more passengers survive crashes,” Flight Safety Foundation president and chief executive Kevin Hiatt told the news source.

Seats built to survive a g-force of 16
Seats installed to comply with seating mandates have been tested to survive crashes with the potential to throw them forward at speeds 16 times the force of gravity to add confidence they would not detach from the plane’s interior or collapse. All Boeing jets have had the new seats since 2009.

Airplane designs also may have helped save even more lives. Planes are designed to be evacuated in as little as 90 seconds, according to CNN, even if some exits are dangerous or unusable. Also, advances in engine testing and components likely prevented the spread of fire.

Continued component testing can further improve the safety of all jets, helping save lives and costs alike.