A New Tool for Coding and Interpreting Injuries in Fatal Airplane Crashes: The Crash Injury Pattern Assessment Tool Application to the Air France Flight AF447 Disaster (Rio de Janeiro–Paris), 1st of June 2009

This article reports on a new software program that can be used to code and analyze crash injuries in aircraft crashes. The authors note that crash injuries patterns of the victims are a vital part of crash reconstruction strategies, which also include data from flight recorders and physical evidence from the site. This new software, Crash Injury Pattern Assessment Tool (CIPAT), uses a coding system derived from the Abbreviated Injury Score (AIS). The AIS is based on the survivability of the injuries, but the new tool creates scores that correspond to the amount of energy required (ER) to cause the trauma. The software computes summary variables primarily related to the position (assigned seat) of victims; the other three components cover injury coding, missing body parts, and data analysis. The authors built a dataset from the postmortem examination of 154/228 victims of the Air France disaster (June 2009), recovered from the Atlantic Ocean at a depth of 12790 ft. The bodies were recovered in two different rescue operations (over a course of 3 months) and the dataset was built using bone trauma lesions only. Using the new software, the authors can estimate that the mechanism to explain such the bone trauma observations would be an initial impact of the tail of the aircraft followed by a break at the roots of the wings inducing a seesaw motion of the nose just before its impact with the sea. The authors conclude that use of CIPAT enabled the determination of precise cause and circumstances of deaths and confirmed major dynamics parameters of the crash event established by the French Civil Aviation Safety Investigation Authority.

• Record URL:
  • https://doi.org/10.1111/1556-4029.12529
• Availability:
  • Find a library where document is available. Order URL: http://worldcat.org/issn/00221198
• Authors:
  • Schuliar, Yves
  • Chapenoire, Stéphane
  • Miras, Alain
  • Contrand, Benjamin
  • Lagarde, Emmanuel
• Publication Date: 2014-9

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Print
• Features: Figures; References; Tables;
• Pagination: pp 1263-1270
• Serial:
  • Journal of Forensic Sciences
  • Volume: 59
  • Issue Number: 5
  • Publisher: Blackwell Publishing
  • ISSN: 0022-1198
  • EISSN: 1556-4029
  • Serial URL: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)1556-4029

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Air transportation crashes; Case studies; Crash injuries; Crash reconstruction; Forensic science; Injury severity; Software
• Identifier Terms: Crash Injury Pattern Assessment Tool
• Subject Areas: Aviation; Safety and Human Factors; I80: Accident Studies; I84: Personal Injuries;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01546259
• Record Type: Publication
• Files: TRIS
• Created Date: Dec 2 2014 2:03PM