Fragments of human bodies. Life78 found out how the identification of victims of air crashes usually goes. Objects of forensic research: fragments of the human body

The wreckage of an airbus that crashed in Sinai is scattered over a fairly large area, the bodies of the dead passengers suffered very badly. Most victims will require special methods to identify them.

At the crash site, forensic experts photograph the surviving body fragments. Then in the laboratory they can be scanned, sometimes even in 3D format. The main details that specialists are looking for are tattoos, moles and other “special signs”. But often the bodies are so damaged that it is impossible to identify the dead by visual means.

In such cases, identification by teeth is often used. Here, the most important features are the structural features of the teeth or their damage, for example, caries, periodontal disease, any operations that were performed on the jaw, or, for example, prosthetics. According to statistics, in 90% of aviation accidents, the identity of the victims is established precisely by dental examination.

Fingerprints are also used. Moreover, since last year, these data must be in the new passports. The papillary pattern on the pads remains unchanged throughout a person's life. Moreover, each one has a unique pattern. But there is a nuance - this method is applicable only if passengers have issued a biometric passport, and not everyone has it yet. In addition, many of the bodies were badly burned. To what extent the method of fingerprinting is applicable in this case, the experts must decide.

Another method used is DNA analysis. It can be done in four different ways. In one, a mitochondrial molecule is needed for comparison. Theoretically, it can be extracted from any tissue. In this mitochondria, most of the hereditary information is located, by which relatives are identified. After the crash of the flight Sharm El Sheikh - St. Petersburg, experts took saliva samples from the relatives of the victims in the emergency headquarters. This genetic material was taken by Russian specialists to Egypt, where the comparison procedure will begin.

DNA identification was introduced in 2010 after the victims of the A330 plane crash in Tripoli were identified. The same method of analysis was used to identify the victims of the MH17 crash that crashed over Ukraine last summer. Then, thanks to the DNA examination of the 298 dead, 296 people were identified.

163 bodies were found at the crash site. They promise that the entire identification procedure will take place in Russia, in the St. Petersburg bureau of forensic examination. It is still difficult to say exactly how it will look like. But if we recall the accident with the Anapa-Petersburg plane in 2006, the identification took place in a small room not far from the place of the tragedy.

Photos of the dead were then simply shown on the screen. Relatives admitted that this was the most difficult test. Moreover, 25 bodies were immediately identified in this way. The remaining 150 passengers had to be identified by DNA. For this, relatives were asked to donate blood samples.

This chapter is devoted to identification genotyposcopy studies that solve the issues of personality identification in the identification of corpses, including dismembered, severely deformed, burned; the discovery of their remains; investigation of murders, grievous bodily harm, rape and other crimes requiring forensic genomic examination of material evidence.

Expert identification genotyposcopy studies, depending on the method of proving the identity of the compared samples, are classified into two groups:

• 1) identification of unidentified corpses and fragments of the human body;
• 2) identification of biological traces from the scene.

Identification of unidentified corpses and fragments of the human body

The objects of examination are separated hair, nails, teeth, blood, as well as soft tissues, bones and their remains.

The tasks solved by this type of genetic identification are divided into two groups:

• 1) determining whether the parts of the corpse found severed belong to the same or different bodies;
• 2) identification of the identity of unidentified corpses, fragments of the human body, their remains.

To identify unidentified corpses, blood, hair, soft tissues, nails, and bones are taken as biological samples. Blood in the amount of 3-5 ml is taken from the cavities of the heart or large vessels and placed on a sterile gauze, which is dried at room temperature.

If it is impossible to take blood (skeletalized, putrefactive, mummified corpse), samples are taken from areas with the lowest degree of putrefactive changes, 2-3 fragments of soft tissues 2.0x2.0x0.5 cm in size; 2-3 nail plates together with the germ layer; 50-60 hairs with follicles (if the corpse has been in the external environment for no more than 1 year); 2-3 bone fragments with spongy substance (for example, ribs) with a total weight of 20-50 g.

Any mechanical, chemical, thermal and other effects on the samples are not allowed. Storage of samples is made at - 30 °C.

The study of dismembered corpses is one of the most complex types of forensic medical examination. Dismemberment of a corpse (chopping, cutting, sawing) occurs during murders in order to conceal a crime or prevent the identification of the deceased (criminal dismemberment), as well as in traffic accidents (air, rail, less often automobile). During criminal dismemberment, parts of the corpse are scattered in different places (they are thrown into water bodies, left at railway stations, buried, etc.), and often partially or completely burned (for example, in boiler furnaces).

Sometimes dismembered parts of the same corpse are found at different times, in different places. Since before discovery they can be in certain conditions, the signs of putrefactive decomposition in them can also be expressed to a different degree.

Thus, to determine the belonging of severely damaged parts of a corpse, human remains, to one body, an identification genotyposcopic examination is practically indispensable. But experts are not omnipotent. No scientist will be able to identify the burnt remains. Time is also important. The probability of a successful examination decreases over the years, because for research it is necessary to detect DNA molecules that have retained hypervariable regions.

Identification of unidentified corpses, fragments of the human body and a specific person is carried out in two ways:

• 1) comparison with the lifetime genetic sample of the alleged deceased or with the sample contained in the automated identification system of genetic and fingerprint records;
• 2) proof of the existence of biological relationship.

Since the first method is direct and does not cause difficulty in understanding, we will dwell in more detail on the consideration of the second method in order to understand the significance of the completeness of providing samples for comparative research and indicating the degree of relationship in the decision.

Since the deceased did not leave a lifetime blood sample, it is possible to conduct a comparative study of the genotype of the discovered remains of a person with the genotypes of his direct biological relatives. The most reliable identification is achieved by establishing a genetic connection of three generations: the parents of the deceased - the deceased himself - the children of the deceased (and their mother). The reliability of establishing biological relationship is higher, the more direct relatives are involved in the study.

A similar research scheme can also be used to identify biological traces (bloodstains, etc.), if it is assumed that they come from a disappeared person whose corpse has not been found.

For identification, genotyping of DNA samples of unidentified corpses, fragments of the human body and alleged parents of the identified person is carried out. This analyzes the nature of inheritance by an identifiable person (child) of genetic traits from parents. In the case of true biological relationship, each trait of the genotype of the deceased must be detected either in the mother's genotype or in the father's genotype, while half of the child's traits must match the traits of the biological mother, and the other half - with the traits of the biological father.

The same scheme is applicable when comparing the genotype of the child (children) of the deceased, their mother and the deceased himself: when establishing biological relationship, each trait of the child's genotype must be detected either in the genotype of the mother or in the genotype of the deceased (father), while half of the characteristics of the child must coincide with characteristics of the biological mother, and the other half - with the characteristics of the biological father.

Deoxyribonucleic acid contains information about both parents, but mitochondrial DNA carries information only about the mother, while the corresponding DNA taken from bones, hair, saliva may differ from each other, therefore, for a more accurate analysis, it is necessary to examine nuclear DNA. But there are cases in which extracting nuclear DNA from a corpse is simply not possible. Consequently, in such a situation, genomic expertise will not be able to give a categorical answer, but will only be probabilistic.

So, the wording of the questions submitted for decision by the genotyposcopy examination, and the nature of the conclusions (probable or categorical) are due to the provision of samples for comparative study (their nature and quantity) at the disposal of the expert.

Options for wording questions submitted for resolution by identification genotyposcopy examination of unidentified corpses and parts of the human body:

• 1) Do the parts of the corpse found severed at address A and at address B belong to the same or different bodies?
• 2) Could the person, fragments of the remains (bones, muscle tissue) of which are presented for research, be Ivanov I.I.?
• 3) Is the blood submitted for examination the blood of Ivanov I.I.?

Original taken from valkiriarf What Passenger Bodies Can Tell About a Plane Crash

Beyond the black box

Dennis Shanagan works from a spacious second-floor office in the house he shares with his wife, Maureen, ten minutes from downtown Carlsbad, California. He has a quiet, sunny office that doesn't look like it's a terrible job. Shanagan is an expert on bodily harm. He devotes a significant part of his time to the study of wounds and fractures in living people. He is consulted by car manufacturers whose customers are suing on dubious grounds (seat belt torn, I wasn't driving, etc.), which can be verified by the nature of their damage. But in parallel with this, he deals with dead bodies. In particular, he took part in the investigation into the crash of Trans World Airlines Flight 800.

A plane taking off from John F. Kennedy International Airport on July 17, 1996 for Paris exploded in mid-air over the Atlantic Ocean near East Morich, New York. Eyewitness accounts were conflicting. Some claimed to have seen the plane hit by a rocket. Traces of explosives were found in the wreckage, but no traces of a projectile were found. (Later it turned out that explosives had been planted in the plane long before the crash - as part of a training program for sniffing dogs.) Versions spread about the involvement of government services in the explosion. The investigation was delayed due to the lack of an answer to the main question: what (or who) dropped the plane from the sky to the ground?

Shortly after the crash, Shanagan flew to New York to inspect the bodies of the dead and draw possible conclusions. Last spring I went to Carlsbad to meet him. I wanted to know how a person does this kind of work - scientifically and emotionally.
I had other questions as well. Shanagan knows all the ins and outs of the nightmare. He can tell in merciless medical detail what happens to people during various disasters. He knows how they usually die, whether they know what's going on, and how (in a low altitude crash) they could improve their chances of survival. I said I would take an hour from him, but I stayed with him for five hours.

A crashed plane can usually tell its own story. Sometimes this story can be heard literally—as a result of transcribing voice recordings in the cockpit; But when a plane crashes into the ocean, its history may be incomplete and incoherent. If the crash site is particularly deep or the current is too strong and chaotic, the black box may not be found at all, and the fragments raised to the surface may not be enough to unambiguously determine what happened on the plane a few minutes before the crash. In such situations, experts turn to what in textbooks on aviation pathological anatomy are called "human debris", that is, to the bodies of passengers. Unlike wings or fuselage fragments, bodies float to the surface of the water. Studying people's injuries (what their type, severity, which side of the body is affected) allows the expert to put together fragments of a terrible picture of what happened.

Shanagan is waiting for me at the airport. He's wearing Dockers boots, a short-sleeved shirt, and pilot-sized glasses. Hair neatly combed in the middle. They look like a wig, but they are real. He is polite, discreet and very pleasant, reminds me of my pharmacist friend Mike.

It doesn't look at all like the portrait I made in my head. I imagined a surly, unfeeling, perhaps verbose person. I planned to conduct an interview in the field, at the crash site of some plane. I imagined the two of us in a mortuary, temporarily built in a small-town dance hall or some university gym, he in a soiled lab coat, me with my notebook. But that was before I realized that Shanagan didn't do autopsies personally. This is done by a team of medical experts from a mortuary located near the crash site. Sometimes he does go to the site and examine the bodies for one reason or another, but still, he mostly works with ready-made autopsy results, correlating them with the passenger boarding plan to identify the location of the source of damage. He informs me that to see him at work. at the scene of the accident, it is probably necessary to wait several years, since the causes of most accidents are quite obvious and it is not necessary to study the bodies of the dead to clarify them.

When I tell him of my disappointment (because I can't report from the crash site), Shanagan hands me a book called Aerospace Pathology, which he assures me has pictures of things I could to see at the crash site. I open the book to the Body Position section. Scattered on the diagram showing the location of the aircraft fragments are small black dots. Lines are drawn from these points to descriptions that are outside the scheme: “brown leather shoes”, “co-pilot”, “fragment of the spine”, “stewardess”. Gradually I get to the chapter that describes Shanaghan's work ("The nature of human injury in air crashes"). Photo captions remind researchers, for example, that "high heat can cause steam to form inside the skull, causing the skull to rupture, which can be confused with impact damage." It becomes clear to me that the black dots with captions give me quite a good idea of ​​the consequences of the disaster, as if I had visited the site of a plane crash.

In the event of a TWA 800 crash, Shanagan suspected a bomb explosion had caused the crash. He analyzed the nature of the damage to the bodies to prove that the plane had exploded. If he had found traces of explosives, he would have tried to find out where the bomb had been planted on the plane. He pulls a thick folder from his desk drawer and pulls out his group's report. Here - chaos and gore, the result of the largest air crash of a passenger plane in numbers, diagrams, and diagrams. The nightmare has been transformed into something that can be discussed over coffee at the morning meeting of the National Transportation Safety Committee. “4:19. In surfaced victims, the predominance of right-sided injuries over left-sided ones. “4:28. Fractures of the hips and horizontal damage to the base of the seats. I ask Shanaghan whether a businesslike and detached view of the tragedy helps to suppress what seems to me a natural emotional experience. He looks down at his hands, fingers intertwined, resting on the Flight 800 case file.

“Maureen can tell you that I didn’t manage myself well in those days. Emotionally it was extremely difficult, especially due to the large number of young people on that plane. The French club of one of the universities flew to Paris. Young couples. It was very hard for all of us." Shanaghan adds that this is an atypical state of experts at the crash site. “In general, people don’t want to dive too deep into a tragedy, so jokes and free chatting is a pretty common demeanor. But not in this case."

For Shanagan, the most unpleasant thing about this case was that most of the bodies were practically intact. “The integrity of the bodies worries me more than its absence,” he says. Things that most of us find hard to look at - severed arms, legs, pieces of the body - for Shanagan, a fairly familiar sight. “In that case, it’s just cloth. You can make your thoughts flow in the right direction and do your job.” It's blood, but it doesn't cause sadness. You can get used to working with blood. But with broken lives, no. Shanagan works just like any pathologist. “You focus on individual parts, not on the person as a person. At autopsy, describe the eyes, then the mouth. You don't stand next to him and think that this man is the father of four children. This is the only way to suppress your emotions.”

It's funny, but it is the intactness of the bodies that can serve as the key to unraveling whether there was an explosion or not. We are on the sixteenth page of the report. Item 4.7: "Fragmentation of bodies." “People near the epicenter of the explosion are being torn apart,” Dennis tells me quietly. This man has an amazing ability to talk about such things in a way that is neither overly patronizing nor overly colorful. If there had been a bomb on the plane, Shanagan would have found a cluster of "heavily fragmented bodies" corresponding to the passengers in the explosion. But most of the bodies were intact, which is easy to see from the report if you know the color code used by the experts. To facilitate the work of people like Shanagan, who have to analyze a large amount of information, medical experts use such a code. Specifically, the bodies of passengers on Flight 800 were labeled green (intact body), yellow (head crushed or one limb missing), blue (two limbs missing, head crushed or intact), or red (three or more limbs missing or complete body fragmentation).

Another way to confirm the presence of an explosion is to study the number and trajectory of the “foreign bodies” that have stuck into the bodies of the victims. This is a routine analysis that is performed using an X-ray machine as part of the investigation into the causes of any air crash. During the explosion, fragments of the bomb itself, as well as nearby objects, scatter to the sides, hitting people sitting around. The nature of the distribution of these foreign bodies may shed light on the question of whether there was a bomb, and if so, where. If the explosion occurred, for example, in the toilet on the right side of the aircraft, the people sitting facing the toilet would have been injured on the front side of the torso. Passengers at the aisle on the opposite side would have been wounded in the right side. However, Shanagan did not find any injuries of this kind.

Some of the bodies bore traces of chemical burns. This served as the basis for the emergence of a version that the cause of the disaster was a collision with a rocket. It is true that chemical burns in aircraft crashes are usually caused by contact with highly corrosive fuels, but Shanagan suspected that the burns were sustained by people after the plane hit the water. Fuel spilled on the surface of the water corrodes the backs of bodies floating on the surface, but not the faces. To finally confirm the correctness of his version, Shanagan checked that the chemical burns were only on the bodies that floated to the surface and only on the back. If the explosion had occurred in an airplane, the splattered fuel would have burned people's faces and sides, but not their backs, which were protected by the seatbacks. So, no evidence of a missile impact.

Shanagan also drew attention to thermal burns caused by flames. A diagram was attached to the report. Investigating the nature of the location of the burns on the body (in most cases, the front part of the body was burned), he was able to trace the movement of the fire through the aircraft. Then he found out how badly the seats of these passengers were burned - it turned out to be much stronger than the passengers themselves, which meant that people were pushed out of their seats and thrown out of the plane literally seconds after the fire started. A version began to take shape that the fuel tank in the wing had exploded. The explosion occurred far enough away from the passengers (and therefore the bodies remained intact), but it was strong enough to break the integrity of the aircraft to the point that it broke apart and people were pushed overboard.

I asked why the passengers were carried out of the plane, because they were wearing seat belts. Shanagan replied that if the integrity of the aircraft is violated, huge forces begin to act. Unlike a projectile explosion, the body usually remains intact, but a powerful wave is capable of pulling a person out of a chair. “These planes fly at over 500 kilometers an hour,” Shanaghan continues. - When a crack appears, the aerodynamic properties of the aircraft change. The motors are still pushing him forward, but he is losing his footing. It starts spinning with monstrous force. The crack widens, and in five or six seconds the plane falls apart. My theory is that the plane fell apart fairly quickly, the seatbacks fell off and people slipped out of the straps that held them in place.

The nature of the injuries on the passengers of Flight 800 confirmed his theory: most people had massive internal trauma, which is usually observed, in the words of Shanagan, with "extremely strong impact on the water." A person falling from a height hits the surface of the water and almost immediately stops, but his internal organs continue to move for a fraction of a second longer until they hit the wall of the corresponding body cavity, which at that moment began to return. Often in falls, the aorta ruptures, because one part of it is fixed in the body (and stops moving along with the body), while the other part, located closer to the heart, is free and stops moving a little later. The two parts of the aorta move in opposite directions, and the resulting shear forces cause it to rupture. Serious damage to the aorta was found in 73% of the passengers on Flight 800.

In addition, when a body falling from a great height hits the water, rib fractures often occur. This fact was documented by former employees of the Institute of Civil Aeromedicine Richard Snyder and Clyde Snow. In 1968, Snyder studied autopsies of 169 suicide bombers who had thrown themselves off the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. 85% had broken ribs, 15% had a broken spine, and only a third had broken limbs. By itself, a fracture of the ribs is not dangerous, but with a very strong blow, the ribs can pierce what is under them: the heart, lung, aorta. In 76% of the cases studied by Snyder and Snow, the ribs pierced the lung. The statistics in the case of the Flight 800 crash were very similar: most of those who died had some form of injury associated with a strong impact on the surface of the water. All had blunt chest injuries, 99% had broken ribs, 88% had torn lungs, and 73% had aortic rupture.

If most of the passengers died as a result of a strong impact on the surface of the water, does this mean that they were alive and understood what was happening to them during a three-minute fall from a height? Alive, perhaps. “If by life you mean the beating of the heart and breathing,” says Shanagan. “Yes, there must have been many.” Did they understand? Dennis thinks it's unlikely. “I think it's unlikely. Seats and passengers fly apart. I think people are completely disoriented.” Shanagan interviewed hundreds of car and plane crash survivors about what they saw and felt during the crash. “I came to the conclusion that these people did not fully understand that they were seriously injured. I found them quite aloof. They knew that some events were happening around, but they gave some unthinkable answer: “I knew that something was happening around, but I didn’t know what exactly. I didn’t feel that it concerned me, but, on the other hand, I understood that I was part of the events.

Knowing how many passengers on Flight 800 had fallen out of the plane in the crash, I wondered if any of them had even a slim chance of surviving. If you enter the water like a sports diver, is it possible to survive after falling from a plane from a great height? It happened at least once. In 1963, Richard Snyder studied cases of people surviving falling from great heights. In the work “Survival of people in free fall”, he cites the case when one person fell out of an airplane at a height of 10 km and survived, although he lived only half a day. Moreover, the poor fellow was not lucky - he did not fall into the water, but to the ground (however, when falling from such a height, the difference is already small). Snyder found that the speed of a person's movement when hitting the ground does not unambiguously predict the severity of the injury. He spoke to runaway lovers who were more seriously injured by falling down stairs than a thirty-six-year-old suicide who threw himself on concrete from a height of more than twenty meters. This man got up and went, and he needed nothing more than a band-aid and a visit to a psychotherapist.

Generally speaking, people who fall from airplanes usually don't fly anymore. According to Snyder's article, the maximum speed at which a person has a tangible chance of surviving when submerged feet first (the safest position) is about 100 km/h. Considering that the final speed of a falling body is 180 km/h and that a similar speed is already achieved when falling from a height of 150 meters, few people will be able to fall from a height of 8000 meters from an exploding plane, survive and then be interviewed by Dennis Shanagan.

Was Shanagan right about what happened to Flight 800? Yes. Gradually, all the main details of the aircraft were found, and his hypothesis was confirmed. The final conclusion was this: sparks from damaged electrical wiring ignited fuel vapors, which caused the explosion of one of the fuel tanks.

The unhappy science of human injury began in 1954 when British Comet planes for some unknown reason began to fall into the water. The first plane disappeared in January near the island of Elba, the second near Naples three months later. In both cases, due to the rather large depth of immersion of the wreckage of many parts of the fuselage, it was not possible to extract, so the experts had to study the "medical evidence", that is, examine the bodies of twenty-one passengers found on the surface of the water.

The studies were carried out at the Royal Air Force Institute of Aviation Medicine at Farnborough under the direction of Captain W. C. Stewart and Sir Harold E. Whittingham, Director of Medical Services for the national British Airline. Since Sir Harold had more than all possible titles (at least five, not counting the title of nobility, were indicated in the article published on the results of the study), I decided that it was he who supervised the work.
Sir Harold and his group immediately drew attention to the peculiarity of the damage to the bodies. All bodies had quite a few external injuries and at the same time very serious damage to internal organs, especially the lungs. It was known that such lung injuries as were found in the passengers of the Comet could be caused by three causes: a bomb explosion, sudden decompression (which occurs when the pressurization of the aircraft cabin is broken), and a fall from a very high altitude. In a catastrophe such as this, all three factors may have played a role. Until this point, the dead hadn't helped much in solving the mystery of the plane crash.
The first version, which began to be considered, was associated with a bomb explosion. But not a single body was burned, not a single body was found to have fragments of objects that could fly apart in an explosion, and not a single body, as Dennis Shanagan would have noted, was torn to pieces. So the idea of ​​a crazy and hateful ex-airline employee familiar with explosives was quickly dropped.

Then a group of researchers considered the version of the sudden depressurization of the cabin. Could this lead to such severe lung damage? To answer this question, the experts used guinea pigs and tested their reactions to rapid changes in atmospheric pressure, from pressure at sea level to pressure at an altitude of 10,000 m. According to Sir Harold, “the guinea pigs were somewhat respiratory failure." Other experimental data, obtained both in animals and in humans, similarly showed only a small negative effect of pressure changes, which in no way reflected the condition of the light passengers of the Comet.

As a result, only the latest version, “extremely strong impact on the water,” could be considered as the cause of the death of the passengers of the aircraft, and the collapse of the hull at high altitude, possibly due to some structural defect, could be considered as the cause of the disaster. Because Richard Snyder wrote Fatal Injuries Resulting from Extreme Water Impact only 14 years after the events, the Farnborough team once again had to turn to guinea pigs for help. Sir Harold wanted to establish exactly what happens to the lungs when a body hits water at top speed. When I first encountered animals in the text, I imagined Sir Harold heading for the Dover Rocks with a cage of rodents and throwing innocent animals into the water where his comrades were waiting in a rowboat with nets. However, Sir Harold did a more meaningful thing: he and his assistants created a "vertical catapult" that allows you to achieve the required speed at a much shorter distance. “Guinea pigs,” he wrote, “were attached with adhesive tape to the bottom surface of the carrier, so that when it stopped at the bottom position of its trajectory, the animals flew belly forward from a height of about 80 cm and fell into the water.” I can well imagine what a boy Sir Harold was as a child.

In short, the lungs of the ejected guinea pigs closely resembled those of the Comet's passengers. The researchers concluded that the planes broke apart at high altitude, causing most of the passengers to fall out of them and fall into the sea. To understand where the fuselage cracked, the researchers paid attention to whether the passengers who were lifted from the surface of the water were dressed or undressed. According to Sir Harold's theory, a person hitting the water when falling from a height of several kilometers should have lost his clothes, but a person falling into the water from the same height inside a large fragment of the fuselage should have remained dressed. Therefore, the researchers tried to establish the collapse line of the aircraft along the border between naked and dressed passengers. In the cases of both aircraft, the people whose seats were at the rear of the aircraft should have been found clothed, while the passengers closest to the cockpit would have been found naked or with most of their clothes off.

To prove this theory, Sir Harold lacked one thing: there was no evidence that a person loses clothes when falling into water from a great height. Sir Harold again undertook pioneering research. Although I would love to tell you about how guinea pigs, dressed in 1950s wool suits and dresses, took part in the next round of Farnborough trials, unfortunately guinea pigs were not used in this part of the study. Several fully dressed mannequins* were dropped into the sea from a Royal Aircraft Center aircraft. As Sir Harold expected, they lost their clothes when they hit the water, and this fact was confirmed by the investigator Gary Erickson, who performed the autopsy of suicides who threw themselves into the water from the Golden Gate Bridge. As he told me, even when falling from a height of only 75 m, "the shoes usually fly off, the trousers are torn along the gusset, the back pockets are torn off."

*You may be interested, as I was wondering, if human corpses were ever used to reproduce the results of people falling from great heights. The manuscripts that brought me closest to this topic were the manuscripts of two papers: J. K. Earley, “Body Terminal Velocity,” dated 1964, and J. S. Cotner, “Analysis of the effect of air resistance on the rate of fall of human bodies” (Analysis of Air Resistance Effects on the Velocity of Falling Human Bodies) from 1962 Both articles, unfortunately, were not published. However, I know that if J.K. Earley had used dummies in his research, he would have written the word "dummies" in the title of the article, so I suspect that several bodies donated for scientific purposes did indeed jump into the water from height. — Note. ed.

In the end, a significant part of the Comet fragments was brought to the surface, and Sir Harold's theory was confirmed. The collapse of the fuselage in both cases actually occurred in the air. Hats off to Sir Harold and the Farnborough guinea pigs.
Dennis and I are having lunch at an Italian restaurant on the beach. We are the only visitors and therefore we can calmly talk at the table. When the waiter comes over to refill our water, I trail off as if we're talking about something secret or very personal. Shanagan doesn't seem to care. The waiter peppers my salad endlessly, while Dennis says that "...a specialized trawler was used to extract the small remains."

I ask Dennis how he can, knowing what he knows and seeing what he sees, still fly airplanes. He replies that not all accidents happen at an altitude of 10,000 m. Most accidents occur during takeoff, landing or near the surface of the earth, and in this case, in his opinion, the potential probability of survival is from 80 to 85%.

For me, the key word here is the word "potential". This means that if everything goes according to an evacuation plan approved by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), there is an 80-85% chance that you will survive. Federal law requires aircraft manufacturers to provide the ability to evacuate all passengers through half of the aircraft's emergency exits in 90 seconds. Unfortunately, in a real situation, evacuation rarely goes according to plan. “When you look at disasters where people can be saved, it's rare that even half of the emergency exits are open,” says Shanaghan. “Plus, there is chaos and panic on the plane.” Shanagan gives the example of the Delta plane crash in Dallas. “In this accident, it was quite possible to save all the people. People received very few injuries. But many died in the fire. They crowded around the emergency exits, but they couldn't open them." Fire is the number one killer in plane crashes. It does not take a strong blow to explode the fuel tank and the fire engulfed the entire aircraft. Passengers die of suffocation as the air becomes scalding hot and filled with toxic smoke from the burning skin of the aircraft. People also die because they break their legs, crashing into the seat in front of them, and cannot crawl to the exit. Passengers cannot follow the evacuation plan in the required order: they run in panic, pushing and trampling each other*.

* Here lies the secret to surviving such catastrophes: you have to be a man. In a 1970 Institute of Civil Aeromedicine analysis of three air crashes using an emergency evacuation system, the most important factor contributing to human survival is gender (second only to the proximity of the passenger seat to the emergency exit). Adult males have a significantly higher chance of being saved. Why? Probably because they are capable of sweeping everyone else out of the way. — Note. ed.

Can manufacturers make their planes less flammable? Of course they can. They can design more emergency exits, but they are reluctant to do so as this will lead to reduced cabin seating and lower revenue. They can install water sprinklers or shock-resistant systems to protect fuel tanks, as in military helicopters. But they don’t want to do that either, because it will make the plane heavier, and more weight means more fuel consumption.

Who decides to sacrifice human lives but save money? Allegedly the Federal Aviation Agency. The problem is that most aircraft safety improvements are evaluated in terms of cost-benefit. To quantify the "benefit", each life saved is expressed in dollar terms. As calculated in 1991 by the US Institute for Urban Development, each person is worth $2.7 million. “This is the financial expression of the death of a person and its impact on society,” FAA spokesman Van Goody told me. Although this figure greatly exceeds the cost of raw materials, the numbers in the "benefit" column rarely rise to such levels as to exceed the cost of manufacturing aircraft. To explain his words, Goody used the example of three-point seat belts (which, like in a car, are thrown both over the waist and over the shoulder). “Well, all right, the agency will say, we will improve seat belts and thus save fifteen lives in the next twenty years: fifteen times two million dollars equals thirty million. Manufacturers will come and say: to introduce such a security system, we need six hundred and sixty-nine million dollars. Here are the shoulder straps.

Why doesn't the FAA say, “Expensive. But are you still going to release them? For the same reason it took the government 15 years to require airbags in cars. Government regulators have no teeth. “If the FAA wants to introduce new rules, it should provide the industry with a cost-benefit analysis and wait for a response,” says Shanaghan. - If the industrialists do not like the deal, they go to their congressman. If you represent the Boeing Company, you have tremendous influence in Congress.”*

*It is for this reason that modern aircraft do not have airbags. Believe it or not, an airbag system for aircraft (called an airstop restraint system) was designed; it consists of three parts protecting the legs, the seat underneath and the chest. In 1964, the FAA even tested the system on a DC-7 using dummies, causing the plane to crash into the ground near Phoenix, Arizona. While the control dummy, wearing the lap belt, was crushed and lost its head, the dummy equipped with the new safety system was in excellent condition. The designers used the stories of World War II combat aircraft pilots who had time to inflate their life jackets just before the crash. — Note. ed. Starting in 2001, to improve the safety of passengers, aircraft began to install shoulder belts and airbags. At the end of 2010, airbags were installed on 60 airlines around the world, and this figure is constantly growing. — Note. per.

In the FAA's defense, the agency recently approved the introduction of a new system that pumps nitrogen-enriched air into the fuel tanks, which reduces the oxygen content in the fuel and, therefore, the likelihood of an explosion that led, for example, to the TWA 800 flight.

I ask Dennis for some advice to those passengers who, after reading this book, every time they board an airplane, will think about whether they will end their lives trampled by other passengers at the emergency exit door. He says the best advice is to use common sense. Sit closer to the emergency exit. In case of fire, bend as low as possible to avoid hot air and smoke. Hold your breath as long as possible so as not to burn your lungs and inhale toxic gases. Shanagan himself prefers window seats, as aisle passengers are more likely to be hit on the head by bags falling from a storage compartment above the seats, which can open even with a slight push.

As we wait for the waiter with the bill, I ask Shanagan the question he's been asked at every cocktail for the past twenty years: Are the passengers in the front or the back more likely to survive a plane crash? “It depends,” he patiently replies, “what type of accident you are talking about.” I'll reformulate the question. If he has the opportunity to choose his seat on the plane, where does he sit?

“First grade,” he replies.

FRAGMENT

FRAGMENT

(lat. fragmentum, from frangere - to break). Fragment, the surviving part of something whole, especially the surviving part of an ancient composition.

Dictionary of foreign words included in the Russian language. - Chudinov A.N., 1910 .

FRAGMENT

lat. fragmentum, from frangere, to break. Fragment.

Explanation of 25,000 foreign words that have come into use in the Russian language, with the meaning of their roots. - Mikhelson A.D., 1865 .

FRAGMENT

essay excerpt, ch. arr. an excerpt from an ancient work that has survived to our time.

Dictionary of foreign words included in the Russian language. - Pavlenkov F., 1907 .

FRAGMENT

excerpt that has survived to our time Ph.D. ancient writing.

A complete dictionary of foreign words that have come into use in the Russian language. - Popov M., 1907 .

Fragment

(lat. fragmentum) fragment, fragment, for example, the surviving remnant of some kind of work of art (painting, architecture, sculpture, etc.); text snippet.

New dictionary of foreign words.- by EdwART,, 2009 .

Fragment

fragment, m. [ latin. fragmentum - fragment] (book). 1. An excerpt from the text. 2. The rest, a fragment of some. works of art.

A large dictionary of foreign words. - Publishing house "IDDK", 2007 .

Fragment

a, m. (fr. fragment lat. fragmentum fragment, piece).
1. A piece of text, a work of art or music, a film, etc. F. novel. F. symphonies.
2. claim. Fragment, remnant of an ancient work of art. The sculpture survived only in fragments..
3. specialist. A separate part of the body or skeleton of a deceased person or animal. Only fragments remain of the bodies of some of those killed in the plane crash.

Explanatory Dictionary of Foreign Words L. P. Krysina.- M: Russian language, 1998 .

Books

• Consuls in the Christian states of Europe and the North American United States. 1894. V. 2. The history of clothing and utensils in the Middle Ages from the 4th to the 14th century to our time. Part 1. Byzantium and the East. Part 2. European peoples (Fragment - 70 pages). , Weiss G.. The book is a reprint edition of 1875. Although serious work has been done to restore the original quality of the edition, some pages may…
• K. Leontiev. Complete collection of works and letters in 12 volumes. Volume 6. Book 2. Fragment from the diary. Autobiographical materials. Wills. Other editions. Applications, K. Leontiev. Volume 6 of the collected works of K. N. Leontiev includes fragments from the author's diary, autobiographical materials, testaments ...