Channel 4 To Crash 300 Seater Aircraft

In an unprecedented international television event, to be broadcast next year on Channel 4, National Geographic Channel and ProSieben, two top pilots will board a passenger jet, fly it out over a vast, empty desert, set it on course to crash land and parachute from the plane.

The resulting high-speed crash will recreate the most common type of serious passenger jet incident and give scientists invaluable information about how planes react in potentially fatal accidents.

The plane will be loaded with cameras and sensors, as well as crash test dummies positioned throughout the aircraft, taking the place of passengers and crew. The crash site will be filmed from every angle.

The resulting footage and data will give an unprecedented insight into what happens when a plane crashes and enable experts to study how areas such as seat belt design, seat arrangement and even overhead baggage can have an impact on passenger safety.

This is the first time an aircraft of this size – a 300 seat wide-bodied passenger jet – has been crash-tested. The aircraft manufacturers do not crash-test whole airplanes of this size. The prohibitive expense and the aviation industry’s good safety record ensure that aircraft engineers feel confident testing specific parts of their planes and using computer modelling to predict how planes will behave in crashes.

But real-life crashes don’t always play by the rules. When a BA 777 crash-landed at Heathrow on 17th January 2008 it baffled aeronautical engineers because it did not react the way the modelling predicted. As one expert put it, ‘Can you predict how a car is going to crash by testing the bumper alone? You have to test the whole thing.’

Geoff Deehan, producer at UK independent Dragonfly, producing the documentary for Channel 4, said, 'As well as making spectacular television, we hope Plane Crash will be one of the most useful experiments ever in the history of aviation, an experiment devised, run and supervised by some of the world's leading aviation experts – experts who are consulted by all the world's leading aircraft manufacturers on aircraft safety, crashworthiness and survivability. It will give us unprecedented answers to the big question: how can we make air crashes more survivable?’

Sydney Suissa, Executive Vice President of Content for NGCI said, ‘Plane Crash offers a rare opportunity to control and dissect every element of an aircraft crash from a scientific angle to see firsthand what happens in this worst case scenario and, hopefully, how tragedy can be averted in the future’.

Prof R John Hansman T. Wilson Professor of Aeronautics & Astronautics and Director, MIT International Center for Air Transportation said, ‘This will be a remarkable opportunity to increase our understanding of full scale aircraft crash dynamics and the factors which influence passenger survivability.

‘Much of our understanding of aircraft impact phenomena come from accident investigations where we only have limited data. It is rare to be able to instrument an aircraft to be able to document what is going on inside and outside of the aircraft during a crash event.

‘This will provide valuable data to calibrate models of crash dynamics, forces on the passengers, and post crash fire.

‘We often crash test automobiles but we rarely are able to conduct crash tests on full scale aircraft.’

Cynthia Bir, Phd, Director of Research, Orthopaedic Surgery, Wayne State University said, ‘This is a great opportunity to be a part of such a large scale experiment that will provide important information. What our team learns during this test will allow us to be able to understand how the human body responds to a high rate loading event. This is an experiment that we would not be able to conduct independently and we are excited to be a part of it.’