"I roll my eyes when the flight attendants go through the life vest drill. Has anyone ever survived a water landing by donning a vest or using a raft?"
In the movie Airport, '77, a Boeing 747 crashes into the ocean and sinks to the bottom intact, the occupants still alive and now encased in a sort of reverse aquarium. Guess I can't blame you, in a way, for finding the whole notion silly. Statistics argue the extreme improbability of going down over water, while Hollywood paints its usual, implausible picture of what it would look like should it actually happen. So the next time the crew is going through that campy vest drill, best to roll your eyes and ignore it, correct?
"Water landing" is a snarky contradiction, but over the decades a handful of airliners have found themselves, through one mishap or another, floating. At least two of these —the 1970 ditching of a DC-9 in the Caribbean, and a 1963 Aeroflot splashdown near Leningrad, were controlled impacts with many survivors.
But, you'll argue, why waste our time when a flight is over land the whole way? Well, keep in mind that planes have overshot, undershot, or otherwise parted company with runways and ended up in the harbor at a coastal airport, sometimes without leaving the ground. If you're flying from New York to Phoenix and you're smirking as the attendant blows into that plastic tube, remember that twice since the late 1980s jets have gone off the end of a runway at La Guardia and ended up in the bay. Both crashes left people very much alive and very much swimming.
In December 2002, in a discussion of "the realities of air safety," The Economist, normally among the most factually credible magazines in the world, quoted a Mr. Jackson of Jane's All the World's Aircraft who stated: "No large airliner has ever made an emergency landing on water." Although the definitions of "large" or "landing" are contestable, this is simply untrue. The Economist continued, "So the life jackets, with their little whistles and lights that come on when in contact with water, have little purpose other than to make passengers feel better." The various accoutrements of the onboard floatation devices might indeed be a bit of overkill (the larger rafts contain everything from signal mirrors to, yes, fishing line and hooks), but this unctuous remark also is false. Vests and rafts have been put to good use by passengers who needed them.
I'd bet the house, if I had one, that it won't ever happen, but if you're in such an accident and have, as will be the case, not paid attention to the briefing, do not inflate your vest while still inside the plane, despite the temptation to do so. When an Ethiopian Airlines 767 ditched off the Comoros Islands after a skyjacking in 1996, several people who'd pre-inflated their vests were unable to move freely and escape the rising water. The devices are designed to provide buoyancy around the neck even if punctured, so if you're unconscious and haven't yet discharging the little cylinder, you'll still float with your head above the surface.
© Patrick Smith 2005. The above text is adapted from ASK THE PILOT. Portions have appeared previously on Salon.com