Children's falls are more easily broken

Tales are legion of the "miraculous" survival of children in plane crashes. Two years ago, a three-year-old American girl was found alive strapped into her seat in what was left of her grandfather's light aircraft. Her first words to her rescuers were to ask the whereabouts of her teddy bear.

In 2003, a two-year-old boy, Mohammed el-Fateh Osman, was found by a nomad beside a tree in Sudan after falling from the remains of the Boeing 737 which crashed close to Port Sudan en route to the capital, Khartoum. He was treated at a specialist burns unit in Essex at the expense of the President of the United Arab Emirates.

The apparent survival of a child in yesterday's Yemenia airline crash is the latest example of a phenomenon which leaves aviation safety experts scratching their heads, still searching for hard evidence that children are more likely to survive an air disaster.

Professor Ed Galea, a safety specialist at the University of Greenwich, said: "Physiologically, there is really no reason why a child should be more likely to survive a plane crash than an adult. Certainly we hear these accounts of children surviving but that may be because we focus more on the survival of an infant or child. It is the case that if you are falling a large distance, then being smaller and having a lower body mass than an adult makes it more likely that something like a tree could break your fall. But generally speaking, air travel is probably more perilous for young children because of the way they are often carried on their parents' laps.

"In the event of turbulence or a heavy landing they are likely to be thrown up into air or crushed by a parent as they are thrown forwards. There is evidence that the lap belt used on a lot of aircraft creates more injury than it prevents."

Investigators looking at the crash of an Avianca Airlines jet outside New York in 1990, which claimed 73 lives, found that 92 per cent of five-year-olds and under survived the crash, while none of the passengers aged 60 or over lived. A report on the incident found there was no clear reason why the children had survived beyond a suggestion that their youth had given them a better chance of overcoming their injuries.