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

Abstract

For investigation of air disasters, crash reconstruction is obtained using data from flight recorders, physical evidence from the site, and injuries patterns of the victims. This article describes a new software, Crash Injury Pattern Assessment Tool (CIPAT), to code and analyze injuries. The coding system was derived from the Abbreviated Injury Score (AIS). Scores were created corresponding to the amount of energy required causing the trauma (ER), and the software was developed to compute summary variables related to the position (assigned seat) of victims. A dataset was built from the postmortem examination of 154/228 victims of the Air France disaster (June 2009), recovered from the Atlantic Ocean after a complex and difficult task at a depth of 12790 ft. The use of CIPAT allowed to precise cause and circumstances of deaths and confirmed major dynamics parameters of the crash event established by the French Civil Aviation Safety Investigation Authority.

Friction ridge analysis in disaster victim identification (DVI): Brazilian case studies

“…Brazil was responsible for the search and identification of the victims and for assisting with the collection of the wreckage. One week after the accident, Brazilian and French rescue teams had recovered 50 bodies and 10% of the plane, an Airbus A330 [ 8 ].…”

Extensive unusual lesions on a large number of immersed human victims found to be from cookiecutter sharks (Isistius spp.): an examination of the Yemenia plane crash

“…The investigation is all the more complex when aquatic environments are involved (i.e. natural disasters, boating accidents and aircraft crashes in the sea [ 6 , 9 , 11 , 13 , 15 ]), not only due to the technical difficulties of accessing the scene and locating victims and remains but also because aquatic taphonomic factors may deeply contribute to the degradation of corpses and thereby introduce uncertainty in establishing the cause and manner of death [ 2 – 18 ]. A major issue is the current lack of useable standards to reliably assess decomposition and identify postmortem modifications—including those caused by fauna—in aquatic milieu and specifically in marine environments [ 19 – 22 ].…”