Below are two excerpts from a British report on Injuries in Fatal Aircraft Accidents.
Read the entire report here
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/8550/303b58ffb92189864c59d57096a45733bd05.pdf
Harness restraint systems are provided in aircraft and these may modify the injuries that are sustained. The unrestrained head will swing forward when the torso is effectively restrained and the body is exposed to eyeball-out or -Gx acceleration. This may put a strain on the atlanto-occipital articulation, which is increased if a heavy helmet with, for example, night vision goggles attached is worn. This joint, therefore, needs careful evaluation.
Recurring Injury Patterns
In the early 1970s the frequency of certain injuries in light aircraft was apparent (Cullen 1973). The regularity of low speed light aircraft crashes was such as to suggest that our efforts would best be directed at injury prevention. A problem was encountered in that no attempts had been made in previous analyses to distinguish between survivable accidents and those that were clearly not survivable. The injury patterns in the non-survivable accidents would clearly confound any analysis. A survivable accident was defined as one in which a survivor resulted or that the deformation of the casualty’s immediate environment was so minor that survival would have been likely had adequate equipment been provided. The frequency of head injury above the eyes was surprisingly uncommon, occurring in only one third of cases. More than 75% had died of cerebral trauma involving the middle third of the face. This sort of injury is clearly not amenable to protection with a helmet.
Often these injuries resulted in fatal fractures to the skull but in some involving the middle third of the face death resulted from complications of the injury such as inhalation of blood. These injuries may
Injuries in Fatal Aircraft Accidents
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also incapacitate the pilot preventing escape from the post crash fire. The discovery of these injuries together with evidence of flailing such as hair and tissue embedded in the instrument panel is evidence that death should be prevented by the provision of upper torso restraint.
injuries