http://192.168.2.6/english/1111/空难中求生.rm

Thanks for watching our internet edition of Nightline, I'm Terry Moran.The increasingly crowded skies present new safety worries every week for air travellers. On Friday,a government study revealed that more than half of US commercial airports don't have an adequate safety margin at the end of a runway. There were three runway mishaps in the last week alone.But too many people think being involved in a plane crash spells certain doom. Most crashes are actually quite survivable,believe it or not. Now one expert has spelt out what it takes to get out alive.Here is ABC's Nick Watt.

Thank you very much.
20 seat,just straight down,sir.
Hello,can I check your boarding pass?
Thank you.

You have a,a metal tube, you crammed it full of people,you put limited exits in that so it's difficult to get out.You then, wrap the whole thing with kerosine, fuel, and then you whirl it down the runway at 150 miles an hour.

That's intrinsically a dangerous environment.Take flight 358 from Paris that touched down in Toronto one stormy afternoon in August last year. 309 people were on board the Air France's jet which overshot the runway ,slammed into a ravine and burst into flames. A passengers’ nightmare.

Why bother watching this report? Why bother listening to the in-flight safety demonstration? I normally just do the crossword or flip through the in-flight magazine.I mean, surely if the plane crashes,we are all dead, right?

Wrong. All 309 people on board that flight from Paris to Taranto survived.It became known as the Toronto Miracle. But surviving an air crash is not a miracle. In fact, between 1983 and 2000 more than 95% of people involved in plane crashes in the US survived. So is there anything you can do to avoid being part of that fatal 5%?

Well this plane far on the tarmac of the English Airport in 1985 set one man on the path to find out.There was no crash, no fatal impact but an engine fire killed nearly half the passengers on board.

Why did 55 people die, why could 55 people not escape?

Professor Ed Galea has pored over interviews with 2000 survivors of 105 plane crashes, analysing their behavior,creating computer simulations of that behavior and searching for the keys to survival.

We saw flames,it was just totally orange at the window,we couldn't see where we were going and people started panicking, err, we,other one jumped out of their seat,their seats.

Lauren like 50% of airline passengers was travelling in a group.

If you're travelling in a family group,you should insist that the airline does not separate you err, through the aircraft.You should be seated together.Why? Well it's only natural that if you're involved in that sort of situation,you're gonna want to, reunite the group before you evacuate. Now if you do that,that's going to cause havoc.

Sit together but be prepared to split apart in a smoke filled cabin.

Perhaps you have one adult is responsible for a particular child and the other adult is responsible for the other child,so now you have,essentially two groups of two people. And the groups should be, err, prepared to evacuate through different exits if necessary,and so ,each child should know,you know,which parent is,is gonna be looking after them in that,in that situation.

Mind goes almost into autopilot, and so when you are've got to release the seat belt, you're not really thinking about and/and what's your most,common experience undoing a seat belt? It's in your car.And how do you undo the seat belt in your car? You press a button.Of course on a plane,you lift a latch rather than pushing a button.Even the pilots travelling back here as passengers, have been known to get that wrong.

Oh...
Ten years ago,the pilot of this hijacked Ethiopian airliner ran out of fuel and ditched in the Indian Ocean.

About 5 minutes before we crashed,we came on with the first of two announcements, saying that you’re gonna / have to ditch,to get ready to ditch. And you know for a water landing, you know, to have everything ready, not, not to inflate, but have on the life vests.

In the panic,not everyone listened. 123 were killed.Many of them drowned,trapped inside the fuselage by the seatbelt