How many possible ways can a plane crash? What are the scenarios!?

I'm writing a story, on how a plane crashes. I have everything planned out, except how the plane crash.





What are possible ways a plane could crash to an island, Lees oil, pressure, I don't know a lot about planes. Also, If a plane did crash on an Island, How long would it be before someone started looking for it, would they find it and how|||Well, count all the moving parts on an airplane, if an important part fails then you can have a crash.








Here's a fine scenario! I saw it on a documentary once (it happened before).





A jumbo jet had a jet attached to the rudder of the aircraft and it was very poorly maintained. So a crack developed in one of the parts of the turbine in it. So the aircraft started up, flew through the air and the stress became too great for the cracked part so it exploded and sent shrapnel through the aircraft's hull.





Here's where it gets really bad. One of the shards cuts open a hydraulic fluid line, so the aircraft quickly ran out of hydraulic fluid. If a plane runs out of hydraulic fluid it can no longer control it's steering, ascending or descending by any conventional means. So it could very easily fall out of the sky and crash and the crew wouldn't be able to do a thing about it.|||Take a look at http://www.airsafe.com/


They have accounts of many different scenarios and lots of additional information.





The important thing to keep in mind is that, despite all of the ways people talk about, crashes are rarely caused by one thing, and that human error is quite often a factor.





Just look at Eastern Airlines Flight 401 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Air鈥?/a> The crew became distracted by what they thought was a problem with the landing gear (but was really just a landing gear light) and consequently failed to notice the chain of events that led to the L-1011 crashing into the ground. If the crew had just flown the plane, there probably wouldn't be a Wikipedia article.





In relation to the post below: while this is true, the loss of hydraulic pressure doesn't mean the plane will "fall out of the sky." The pilot managed to land in the case of UAL 232 by varying the thrust from the engines.





The same was true for a DHL plane that was heavily damaged in Iraq (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DHL_shootdo鈥?/a>





Many aircraft can electrically lower the flaps (ALTN Flaps) and drop the gear using gravity when the hydraulics go bad.





It should also be noted that systems on newer aircraft are much better, so the chance for loss of hydraulic pressure is much lower.|||Engine failure, hydraulic failure and structural integrity failure are the three big possibilities. An easy way around this would be to just have the passengers wake up on the island - quite often the brain will block traumatic experiences. I was in a really bad car wreck once, never lost consciousness, yet am missing an hour's worth of time right around the accident.|||Looking for a creative way for a plane to crash on an island? What kind of plane is it? Is it a heavy passenger jet or small private plane? How high was it when it "failed" before it crashed? I'd love to help. email me at rivet409@yahoo.com|||One it can get out of gas two lose control three blow up four hit another plane five the landing hit in water DONE!|||Infinite number of ways. Look up some crashes on the NTSB sight and pick one you like.|||there at least 10.000 ways for a plane to crash|||If it's for a story, the simplest way for the plane to crash is through total engine failure, even though that's unlikely in real life, if it's an airliner (smaller aircraft with propellers and piston engines are much more prone to engine trouble). Since an airplane can land safely without engines, this also allows the crash to provide plenty of survivors and/or an intact airplane, if the plot requires it.





Since jet engines rarely fail, if you need them to all fail at once, you need some sort of pretext to explain it. One possibility is fuel exhaustion, if the aircraft somehow didn't have enough fuel on board, or if there was a fuel leak. Another possibility is something like an encounter with volcanic ash from a nearby volcano, which can clog and stop the engines and force a landing. Both of these have happened in real life, although generally nobody was hurt and the plane landed okay.





A search for a commercial airliner will begin very quickly, since airliners are usually in regular communication with the ground and are very rapidly missed. A private plane would not bring about a search nearly as fast, but as long as it had a flight plan, eventually people would start looking for it (perhaps several hours after it failed to show up, depending on the route and length of the flight).





A private plane that flies without a flight plan might not be missed for days or weeks.





Aircraft have emergency locating beacons that can be detected by satellite and that broadcast their positions. If this device is on board, the aircraft can be located very quickly, as long as it's on land. If it sinks into a deep part of the ocean, it may be much more difficult to find (as in the case of Air France Flight 477).