Background:
One ordinary people may become a hero someday. As time proceeds, with probability acting ubiquitously, nothing is impossible, and we need to be ready for any sort of critical situation at any time.
On 14th of May in 2018, the captain Chuanjian Liu was flying his flight, 3U8633, at 9800m altitude above the Tibetan Plateau. About half an hour after he has taken off, at 7 am, ‘one of the cockpit windshields on the copilot’s side blew off during the climb towards cruising altitude’, after some cracks appearing for some unknown reason. Some panels and instruments in the cockpit has blown out immediately. The copilot had half of his body blew outside due to the extraordinarily unbalanced pressure inside and outside the aircraft body; but he had his belt on, and the broken windshield was right at the front of the cockpit so wind was blowing into the aeroplane, thus the lucky copilot essentially managed to climb back into the cockpit, with his right arm and waist wounded. It was such an urgent condition: under -40℃, pilots only had their shirts on; at a speed of approximately 225 m/s whilst wind kept blowing in, with almost no air supplied inside the cockpit for a few minutes; the plane was on a position flying down towards a sea of mountains; and the automatic cruising system was out of control, the pilots weren’t even sure if the apparatuses were working, or providing incorrect data; with hardly any contact to the control towers or to each other due to the loudness of the wind; the unbalanced pressure has injured the copilot’s ear. It was the crucial moment for 128 lives.
As a miracle, following his rich experience, our captain managed to divert to Chengdu Shuangliu International Airport, with 0 death, by manually looking outside to see the direction of flight. Recently there was a movie newly released, themed in this event.
Scientific Comments:
Apparently, there are lots of engineering issued involved, but a detail caught my attention as a statistician. Once in an interview in early 2019, Chuanjian mentioned that the safety notes under urgent circumstances are now electronic on a pad, which was sucked outside the window immediately once the accident happened. However, even if the pad did not go missing, it was still not helpful because there was nothing about what to do when the windshield blows off. Statistically the safety notes shall contain those most crucial circumstances, but how to decide which ones are the most crucial ones?
It isn’t necessary to go deeper into more detailed probabilities for each individual onboard with further assumptions; they are lucky enough, that they’ve got a captain who loves swimming and diving, so he was able to remain awake and calm, to adjust the flight parameters first, at the moment suddenly there was no air supplied. Yes, due to the effect of survivorship bias, it may not be necessary to include such a circumstance in the safety notes for a pilot, but how if we didn’t have a captain who loves swimming, and wouldn’t be so comfortable with vacuum? How if the copilot totally relaxed and didn’t have any belt at all? How if the airport was not so close to the location where the accident happened? Shall we still expect the same luck for such accident next time? Is the luck itself, real or random, in this event? We can’t expect the same things to happen all the time when similar events occur, since the chance for all the details to re-appear will be extremely low. Even if the same thing happened 28 years ago on a British plane, BAC1-11 5390, when the body of captain was entirely sucked outside the cockpit and the airplane was driven by the copilot until landed at Southampton. When we simply think such kind of events has a low chance of occurring, or pilots are supposed to successfully deal with them every time, and thus no longer consider such situations in the safety notes, then these events will be more likely to be disastrous once they really happen.
Like driving an airplane, our decisions about what to write in the safety guide also needs the tool of statistics, to get out of the fog and into power.
Science Scholars 2019 
