Stalls in the Pattern

[steveinindy]

Gotcha, understand. Lots of tubing and whatnot for the passenger to be clutching....

I heard the hand-injury thing at an NTSB presentation ~25 years ago, undoubtedly the state of the art is improved.

Ron Wanttaja

Well, among the folks who actually bother to read the forensic literature, yes it has. You still hear folks- including NTSB investigators and even their safety and survivability folks- treat it like gospel because it is so ingrained in the literature (there are references to it that I have found dating back to the 1920s) and lore of aviation pathology and crash investigation that you can't convince them otherwise. That is a major problem with these folks in that they treat the practice of investigation more like a religion rather than a scientifically grounded exercise.

You can also get similar injuries from someone's arms and legs flailing during the crash deceleration. This is an area that really needs to have more research before it is finally dismissed or is able to be applied in a more rigorous manner. Myself and a couple of colleagues (a forensic pathologist and a forensic radiologist respectively) are working on a retrospective review to see if we can do something about that.