That’s sad. I can only imagine the amount of panic they must have went through.
I wonder what other fatal accidents have been caused by dropped electronics such as iPads and iPhones getting stuck under accelerators and brake pedals in cars and long haul trucks as an example.
There’s obviously distracted driving as well which is a major problem.
My neighbor, a photographer, was on a tour group which took three helicopters up and only two returned. [1] They had an aftermarket restraint system to tether the passengers in and they were required to cut the restraint to free themselves in case of emergency, or unbuckle the tether from behind them which was time consuming. One passenger's restraint accidentally engaged the emergency fuel shut off lever, and by the time the pilot figured out what had happened it was too late to correct things and he was forced to land in the river.
None of the passengers were able to cut the restraint to free themselves, and all five drowned.
It's not really the same as dropped electronics but it's an example of a safety system gone awry.
For me, the aspect of that accident that never gets enough attention is the partial failure of the floats.
I think everyone understands that asking people who have never drilled a helicopter water escape to take special actions in an emergency, let alone reach behind them and cut a tether, is just never going to work, certainly not in the few seconds they had. If the floats had functioned as designed, according to the investigation, everyone would have survived. Instead, either because the pilot did not fully activate them, or due to some malfunction, the right float did not inflate, causing the helicopter to capsize.
It's not completely clear to me, but I don't think they ever completely identified the malfunction that resulted in this, but as far as I'm concerned, it's a malfunction in a safety-critical system that caused deaths, and I'm surprised it's not the primary highlight of this accident.
Right, they would have had the time to remove the tethers if it hadn't sank. Like everything else, I'm sure that they require some amount of maintenance and I wonder if that's the sort of thing which can be tested without destroying it. I trust that my car's airbag will deploy if it's in an accident, but I really can't check that. A non-trivial number of airbags fail to deploy when they, in fact, should.
I'm not surprised that the tether is the focus, though -- it's the reason why the helicopter crashed to begin with and also prevented the passengers from escaping.
> ground crew were responsible for attaching and detaching a locking carabiner to the back of each passenger's supplemental harness at the start and end of each flight.
Not only were the supplemental harnesses nearly impossible to get out of by yourself in an emergency situation, but the supplemental harness is what triggered the crash in the first place, by getting stuck on the fuel shutoff lever.
I wonder how many lives those supplemental harnesses have saved, versus the 5 they cost here.
I want to emphasize the point here that the cause of the accident was itself a component of a safety system.
One point that repeatedly gets lost in considerations of risk and security is that more complex systems intended to compensate for other risks will themselves become part of the risk and/or threat profile.
I've both read of this many times in the case of incidents which occur elsewhere, and have seen it firsthand myself where some system or method itself intended to compensate for a risk turns out to be the cause of an incident.
Power backup systems, fire suppression systems, failover / load-balancer devices, and many cases of safety or audit code, just off the top of my head.
> I wonder what other fatal accidents have been caused by dropped electronics such as iPads and iPhones getting stuck under accelerators and brake pedals in cars and long haul trucks as an example.
Toyota recalled 38m cars because of potential for mats stuck under gas pedals. With at least one fatal incident:
I flew recently and part of the pre-flight announcement now is if you drop a phone or other electronic device between seats, do not try to retrieve it. Call a flight attendant and let them retrieve it.
Apparently, people have dropped their phone then while trying to retrieve it, moved the seat and bent the phone, puncturing the battery.
I did this a few years ago during taxi before take-off, in a business class seat on a flight to Tokyo (I’m not bragging, it’s literally the only time in my life I’ve ever not flown economy)
I had to move to another seat when I wanted to recline it for sleeping, because the crew (quite rightly) didn’t want my iPhone getting chewed up in the mechanism.
Despite me using my Apple Watch to make the “find me!” ping sound, nobody could find it during the flight, so they had to partly dismantle the seat when we landed. It was all very embarrassing, I had to stand there for 20 minutes watching ground crew take it apart.
I didn’t dare tell anyone that I didn’t turn it onto airplane mode before I dropped it.
While the consequences are less severe, losing them in the seat is one reason I absolutely will not use wireless earphones when flying. I did drop a phone once into a seat but the flight attendant was able to recover it.
> didn’t dare tell anyone that I didn’t turn it onto airplane mode before I dropped it.
I try to remember if only to preserve battery life but I'm willing to bet the vast majority of people don't.
My wife dropped her engagement ring in to a China Airlines seat. Luckily, since it was a flight to Taiwan, we were able to use chopsticks to retrieve the ring from inside the seat!
In this case it was not the attempt to retrieve the tablet that caused the accident, it was being unable to reach it to remove it from being jammed in the pedals.
Can't remember where I read it, but I heard a theory a long time back that people freaking out about spiders and insects in their cars could account for a significant number of unexplained car accidents. I wonder if we've ever had an aircraft accident because of that.
Quiet plausible... a long time ago i took my motorcycle out for the first ride after a long pause, as soon as i left the town where i live in and a moment before i would yank the throttle open an ABSOLUTELY GIANT (so perhaps a few milimeter) spider crawled on the inside of my helmets visor. I panicked hard, brought the bike to a screaching halt, yanked the helmet from my head and threw it astaundingly far away into the wheat field where i stood next to.
I was lucky, would this have happen while riding at 250 km/h or knee down in a curve... no, i don't want to think about...
Finding the helmet afterwards was interesting enough...
I once had a wasp hiding near my center console start stinging my arm as soon as put my arm down as I started driving. Fortunately, I was still in my residential neighborhood so I was able to pull over and jump out of the car without causing an accident but it's easy to imagine the poorer consequences had I been a little further in my journey.
I have unpredictible behavior when spiders or roaches are crawling on me, it’s an automatic reaction I can’t seem to control. Im not really afraid of spiders or roaches so no phobia involved. Once I almost broke my arm, I hit it really hard to a wall to get the thing off.
If you're serious about it, the way that I (accidentally) found that works is to keep some spiders and roaches as pets. I used to be the same way, involuntarily flinching whenever a large enough insect would crawl on me until I adjusted to being around them all the time. The roaches and smaller spiders don't trigger any kind of involuntary reflex anymore. I do still flinch when the largest spiders (> 5 inch leg span) move very quickly while I'm doing maintenance but I'm pretty okay with that, especially because one of them could put me in the hospital.
I had a wasp fly into my motorbike helmet one time. The visor was down but cracked open slightly to stop it fogging up, and it was just big enough for one unlucky bug. Luckily it didn't sting me and I was able to come to a controlled stop and take the helmet off, but if I'd been in mid-corner and it stung me, it would have been bad news.
I was cycling with loose shorts once and a bee flew up the leg and stung my upper inner thigh. I'm sure if there was anyone else on the path when that happened, I would've crashed into them.
Tangentially related, there’s Eastern Air Lines Flight 401. The flight crew unwittingly crashed the plane while preoccupied with a burnt out landing gear confirmation light.
I wonder what other fatal accidents have been caused by dropped electronics such as iPads and iPhones getting stuck under accelerators and brake pedals in cars and long haul trucks as an example.
There’s obviously distracted driving as well which is a major problem.