Video: Passenger jet crashes into Mexican desert - on purpose

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A TV production company have crashed a 170 passenger-capacity Boeing 727 plane into the Mexican desert - for a new show called Curiosity.

Nobody was hurt in the staged crash, and the jet was packed with crash test dummies.
Cameras were placed inside the plane, on the ground and from the ejecting pilot's helmet to get footage for the programme, which investigates how to make plane crashes "more survivable", reports the Huffington Post.

According to USA Today, the Discovery Channel's group president Eileen O'Neill said in a statement: "The project aims to recreate a serious, but survivable, passenger jet crash landing with a real aircraft in order to allow an international team of experts to study the crashworthiness of the aircraft's airframe and cabin as well as the impact of crashes on the human body, plus possible means of increasing passenger survivability and evaluating new 'black box' crash-recording technology.

"This groundbreaking project features an actual crash of a passenger jet and explores the big questions about how to make plane crashes more survivable.

"We hope to provide new information about how to improve the chances of survival while providing scientific results on passenger safety and new technologies, including new 'black box' flight data recording systems."

It is the first time in 30 years that a passenger plane has been purposefully crashed for a scientific experiment.

According to the Daily Mail, the last time was in 1984 when NASA teamed up with FAA to crash a Boeing 720 into the Mojave Desert in California.

This time around, the plane was crashed into an unpopulated part of the Sonoran Desert of Baja California, Mexico, and was a result of four years of work by London-based TV company Dragonfly Film and Television Productions.

Sanjay Singhal, executive producer of the documentary, said: "We felt the time was right to do it again.

"It has never been safer to fly, but we want to use this as an opportunity to provide scientific data that might help to improve passenger safety in those extremely rare cases when a catastrophic aircraft accident does occur.

"This has been an extraordinary feat of organisation, involving up to 300 people on location, including the production team, pilots, experts, risk management, plus local crew, military, fire teams and police."

The programme will be shown on Channel 4 later in the year, and senior commissioning editor David Glover said: "We hope that this documentary will provide valuable new scientific results as well as giving passengers vital information about how they can improve their own chances of surviving the extremely unlikely, but frightening, prospect of being in a serious plane crash."

See amateur footage of the crash below:

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