The First Sixty Minutes
An aircraft coming down is not in your hands. The hour after it stops moving is entirely in your hands, and most of what kills people in that hour is panic, not the crash.
The thing most people get wrong about a plane crash is that they think of it as a single event. It is not. There is the impact, which is brief and out of your control, and there is the hour that follows, which is long and almost entirely within it. The people who walk away from survivable crashes — and a great many of them are survivable — are not lucky. They are the ones who treated the hour after as a job to be done, step by step, while everyone around them was busy being a victim. I have never been in a crash. I have spent a lifetime in the discipline of the bad hour after a bad thing, and the principles do not care what the bad thing was.
The first five minutes: survive the stop
If you see impact coming, brace. Head down, arms tight, feet planted, body small. Keep the belt fastened until the aircraft has completely stopped moving — not when it seems to be stopping, when it has stopped — because a second impact with you unbuckled is a second crash you take with your face. The moment it is still, your eyes do one job and one job only: read the environment. Where is the fire, where is the smoke, where is the nearest exit that is not on fire. Check the people next to you. Then move.
Five to fifteen: get out and get away
If it is safe to go, go now and go with empty hands. Your bag is not worth your life and it is certainly not worth the lives of the people behind you whom it will slow. Use the nearest usable exit, not the one you came in by — the familiar one may be the one that is burning. Once out, do not stop at the wreckage. Get at least a hundred metres clear and get upwind if you can. Jet fuel does not care that the worst is over; it can ignite or go up well after the aircraft has come to rest. Distance from the airframe is the single most useful thing you can buy in these minutes, and it is free.
Fifteen to thirty: assess and care
Now, at distance, you check yourself. Honestly. Breathing, bleeding, the things shock will hide from you. Adrenaline is a liar that tells you you are fine; look anyway. Control bleeding with direct, firm pressure. Improvise from clothing if you must. Once you are squared away, help the people who cannot help themselves, prioritising the serious injuries and the silent ones over the loud ones — a man who can scream is a man who can breathe. And reassure. A calm voice in that field is a medical instrument. Panic spreads as fast as fire and does nearly as much damage.
Thirty to forty-five: shelter and conserve
Rescue may be hours away, so start thinking like a man who is staying a while. Use the wreckage, the seats, natural cover — anything that stands between you and sun, wind, rain, or cold. Exposure is a slow killer that finishes the job the impact started, and it works on you while you feel fine. Sip water if you have it. Avoid alcohol and salt. Rest. Conserve everything — energy, water, body heat — because the body that idles survives the body that thrashes.
Forty-five to sixty: be found
You have stayed alive. Now make staying alive count by becoming impossible to miss. Bright colour laid out where it can be seen from above. A mirror or anything that throws light. Large shapes scraped or built from debris — the eye finds geometry in a wilderness. Make noise in intervals: three of anything — three shouts, three bangs on metal, three blasts of a whistle — is the old signal for distress, and rescuers know it. Then stay alert, watching and listening, ready to signal and ready to follow instructions when help arrives.
The order never changes
Strip away the specifics of any disaster and the priorities sit in the same order. Get out of the danger. Stay alive — stop the bleeding, hold the body together. Conserve what keeps you going. Be found. Run them in that sequence and you have done the only part of a catastrophe that was ever yours to do.
The crash is fate. The hour after is character. Most people who die in the hour after were never going to die in the crash — they died waiting to be rescued by someone they refused to be: themselves.
Details left deliberately bare, because this one needs no place and no year. The order of the hour does not change.
— M.