On Dec 18, 9:41 pm, Alain Fournier wrote:
John Schilling wrote:
If a rocket crashes, it will probably "explode". Big-ass fireball, at
very least. But the same tends to be true of jet airplanes, and in
either case the explosion is almost always A: the result, not the cause,
of the crash, and B: irrelevant because the vehicle and payload were
already lost on account of being smashed into the ground at high speed
or something like that.

The rest of your post is all true, but the fire after an airplane crash
is not at all irrelevant. The vast majority of passengers in airplane
crashes survive the crash, many of them do not survive the fire. For
rocket rides the odds are very different.

Alain Fournier

That will be only true in case of a controlled crash landing. In an
uncontrolled crash, there will not have been any successful attempts
at redusing the speed of the impact, if as sometimes has been the case
the plane has fallen from the sky from several thousand feet up, the
impact with the ground fill most likely kill everyone on board. The
same will probably be true when a plane impacts the ground, due to
pilot error - say flying into a mountain, when flying at high speed. A
jetliner impacting a mountain at say 880 km/h. will very likely result
in the immediate death of most onboard from the force of the impact
alone.

I recall an accident in Japan when a B-747 impacted a mountain killing
500 or so onboard, leaving only a single survivor.

Einar