Unthinkable_ Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why - Amanda Ripley [37]
A Plane Crash Imagined
In order to imagine what it might feel like to lose your senses under stress, I visited the Federal Aviation Administration’s training academy in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. In a field behind one of their labs, they have hoisted a section of a jet onto risers. One afternoon, I boarded the mock-up plane along with thirty flight-attendant supervisors. Inside, it looked just like a normal plane, and the flight attendants made jokes, pretending to be passengers. “Could I get a cocktail over here, please? I paid a lot of money for this seat!” But once smoke started pouring into the cabin, everyone got quiet.
As most people do, I underestimated how quickly the smoke would fill the space, from ceiling to floor, like a black curtain unfurling in front of us. The smoke was nontoxic, but it still had the desired effect. Most people have no concept of how little they will be able to see in a fire, and how much harder the brain will have to work as a result. We would get a very mild preview.
In less than twenty seconds, all we could see were the pin lights along the floor. As we stood to evacuate, there was a loud thump. In a crowd of experienced flight attendants, someone had hit his or her head on an overhead bin. Under a minor amount of stress, our brains were already performing clumsily. As we filed toward the exit slide, crouched low, holding on to the person in front of us, several of the flight attendants had to be comforted by their colleagues. Then we emerged into the light, and the mood brightened. The flight attendants cheered as their colleagues slid, one by one, to the ground.
Next, we headed to the indoor pool for a water rescue. We wore regular clothing, just like passengers, and jumped into the pool—yanking a cord to inflate our life jackets as we entered the water. (In real crashes, people usually ignore instructions and inflate their life vests while they’re still on the plane—an understandable mistake, given the stress of the situation. But the inflated vest is an unwieldy, bloated affair that takes up valuable space in a plane and makes it hard to walk and see.) The first exercise involved getting picked up by a “helicopter” in a basket lowered from the ceiling. Once again, there was a lot of clapping and cheering.
But then we moved on to the life-raft exercise. Just getting into the giant, yellow raft was an ordeal. We had to heave each other up and into the raft. In the tumult, one flight attendant got a black eye and had to sit out the rest of the simulation. Once inside the boat, the strong smell of vomit (from the chemically treated plastic of the raft) heightened the realism. Then we had to unfurl the raft’s unwieldy tarp over our heads to create a shelter against the frigid “waves” crashing down on top of us (courtesy of a merciless FAA trainer with a hose). In the dim light, a female flight attendant with a loud, low voice shouted out instructions from a rescue kit while the rest of us bailed water and held on to the tarp.
It was hard to hear or think with the constant thud of the water hitting our precarious plastic shelter. Every thirty seconds or so, when a spray of ice-cold water leaked through, my fellow survivors would erupt in shrieks. At that moment, I remembered once being told by a military researcher that very cold or very hot environments tend to degrade human performance very, very quickly. The effect tends to be geometric. Sitting there for just five minutes in the wet, stinking huddle, I felt suddenly exhausted. I knew I’d be out of there in time for dinner. I knew my life wasn’t even remotely in danger, and I did not feel afraid. But