Another child survivor

Back in July (see my blog of July 4) I blogged about how the only survivor of an air crash off the Comoros islands in the Indian Ocean was a 12 year old girl, and mentioned other air accidents where children seem to have survived better than adults.

Now a nine year old Dutch boy has emerged as the sole survivor of Wednesday’s plane crash at Tripoli in which the other 103 people aboard died. Ruben van Assouw’s parents and brother had all been killed. The boy suffered multiple fractures to his legs.

The Afriqiyah Airways Airbus 330 crashed just short of the runway at Tripoli airport on its arrival from Johannesburg. The cause of the crash isn’t yet known, and the head Libyan investigator said the pilot had reported no problems on his approach.

Before Ruben, there had been just 15 cases in the last 40 years of one person surviving a commercial air crash, and in 6 of them the survivor was a child; in two others it was a 17 year old. My earlier blog explores potential reasons.