The last thing you’d ever want to hear as a passenger on a plane is an instruction telling you to prepare for a water landing, but for 100 passengers on a Spirit Airlines flight, that is exactly what they experienced.
In a short 16 second clip posted to TikTok by “TravelTMZ” we see the passengers onboard the plane all decked out in yellow life jackets as the pilot tells them they’re having an emergency landing. Clearly something is wrong with the plane, maybe it’s a Boeing? The audio is pretty difficult to hear but it certainly sounds like a nightmare scenario with the turbulence and the strange beeping that sounds like it could be Satan’s lullaby before the pilot makes the announcement.
The caption underneath the video asks “What are you doing in this situation?” Me personally? I’d probably start shaking, crying, and throwing up before praying to every god I can think of. The passengers certainly seem pretty distressed as well, and it’s hard to blame them.
The clip currently has around 700,000 views, and plenty of comments wanting a bit more context: what was the reason for the plane making an emergency landing? And, more importantly, what happened next? “Is this video real and did they really land in water do anybody have any update on this.” Some comments claimed that the odds of the passengers surviving if the did land on water were low, “if they landed on water there is around a 99% chance you wont survive.”
What is the survival rate of an emergency water landing?
There aren’t actually a great deal of statistics for the survival rates of emergency landings in a body of water, especially for commercial flights. However, from what I could find, it seems the odds of survival are much higher than you’d think. According to an article from NBC News, there’s a 95% chance of surviving the initial plane crash, although unless rescued quickly, the odds of survival drop because, you know, you’re in open water, so there’s a high likelihood of drowning.
We can assume that these passengers likely survived considering we have a video that must belong to one of the passengers. But we don’t actually have to assume because, although there isn’t a follow-up video on the incident, the whole thing has already been covered by plenty of news outlets.
An article from USA Today reports that the plane was headed from Jamaica to Florida before problems occurred. Maybe it’s because Florida is just cursed for some reason, but the plane had to divert and head back before it could reach its destination.
Luckily, they never had to make that emergency water landing — the pilots were able to land safely at Montego Bay (MBJ) airport. While the whole thing was certainly a nightmare for everyone involved, it could have definitely gone a lot worse.