WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- While Canadian officials and others call the survival of all 309 people on a jet that crashed in Toronto a miracle, aviation and safety experts said on Wednesday that most passengers do escape air disasters, especially accidents that occur on the ground.
"There is this myth out there that says if you're involved in a catastrophic aircraft accident the odds are extremely low. That's inaccurate. The odds are extremely high," said Mark Rosenker, the acting chairman of the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board.
The board investigates aircraft accidents and has sent experts to Canada to help examine the four engines on the ill-fated Airbus A340-300 that ran off the runway in a heavy thunderstorm on Tuesday at Pearson International Airport.
The U.S. team will also look at evacuation procedures and other reasons why all 297 passengers and 12 crew escaped the huge plane that thundered down an embankment after landing and erupted in flames. Most of the plane was destroyed by fire.
Already, Air France and airport rescuers credit the entire flight crew for managing the disaster calmly and professionally.
"The evacuation probably took two minutes maximum," said Toronto airport fire chief Mike Figliola. "They (the crew) did a great job. They are trained to get the people off."
A U.S. safety board analysis of 568 crashes (71 of them fatal) between 1983-2000 found that 95 percent of passengers, or 51,000 people, survived. In a closer study of 26 notable crashes -- those that included fire, serious injury or substantial damage or destruction of the plane -- more than half of 2,700 occupants made it out alive. In Toronto, passengers beat those odds entirely with 100 percent survival.
Those crashes where people do not survive always involve mid-air explosions or open water accidents. Both of those factored into the TWA Flight 800 disaster in 1996 off New York. A Swissair MD-11 also crashed into the Atlantic off Nova Scotia in 1998 because of an onboard fire.
But in a ground crash similar to that in Toronto, an American Airlines DC-9 ran off the runway in Little Rock, Arkansas, during a violent rainstorm in June 1999. The jet struck a light fixture, slid into a ditch and caught fire. The captain and 10 others were killed, but 134 people survived. And in March 2000, 43 of 142 people aboard a Southwest Airlines 737 were hurt when the plane ran off the runway in Burbank, California.
Charles Eastlake, a pilot a professor at Embry Riddle Aeronautical University, also credited passengers aboard the Air France flight. "In interviews, people seemed calm and collected. The mental attitude makes a gigantic difference in how quickly the plane gets evacuated," he said.
