Breaking Down Airline Safety: Early Evacuation Insights from the Azerbaijan Airlines Crash
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Azerbaijan Airlines Flight J2-8243, an Embraer 190, crashed in Kazakhstan on December 25th, 2024. There were 62 passengers and 5 flight crew on the aircraft. Twenty-nine survived the crash.
Although it has been confirmed the aircraft crashed secondary to Russian anti-aircraft fire, there are still teaching points on air travel emergencies relevant to passengers world wide.
The aft section of the aircraft landed upside down. Experts feel that only about 1% of airline crashes result in aircraft landing upside down. This is much more common in general aviation (small private) plane crashes, where the plane’s nose digs into the ground and flips over. Larger commercial aircraft don’t do that on impact very often. In this case, the tail section broke off some distance from the rest of the aircraft crash site and came to rest inverted.
Moving toward the emergency exits in an upside-down aircraft will be disorienting and challenging. The seat backs will be a visual barrier when looking for exits. In the US, the FAA requires emergency exit path lighting at the floor level. This ensures it is visible in a smoke-filled cabin, but in an upside-down smoke filled aircraft, it will not be visible.
Emergency exit doors should still open upside down, as most floor-level exits open horizontally. Precisely following the opening diagram on the door should still allow passengers to open the door.
Evacuation slide ramps deploy automatically when the emergency exit is opened. Slide ramps inflate straight out from the aircraft fuselage and then drop down into place with gravity. If the aircraft comes to a stop upside down, the slide ramps will still inflate straight out, but when they drop down, they will overhang the emergency exits, further slowing passengers exiting the plane.
In most of the videos of the crash site currently available, an evacuation slide ramp is seen visible, laying off to the side of the aircraft. However, a very early video shows it attached to the fuselage, inflated, and partially blocking the 2R aft floor-level exit.
