Question about Turkish Airlines Flight 1951 Crash

[james_davis_nicoll]

This article gives a list of fatalities by nationality. One detail jumped out at me.

 Nationality 	Passengers/Crew 	  Fatalities             %
 Netherlands 	       53 	             0                   0
 Turkey 	       51 (inc. 7 crew)      5 (inc. 4 crew)    10% 
 United States 	        7 	             4                  57%
 United Kingdom 	3 	             0                   0 
 Germany 	        1 	             0                   0
 Bulgaria 	        1 	             0                   0
 Italy        	        1 	             0                   0
 Taiwan 	        1 	             0                   0
Total 	              118 	             9                   8%

Were the Americans all seated in the same section of the plane? At least three of the crew killed were in the cockpit; it would make sense if the Americans just had the misfortune of clustering in a section that, like the cockpit, sustained heavy damage.

Comments

First Class

[adamek]

Lot's of damage up front, cockpit & first class? It wouldn't surprise me if those 4 Americans were in the first row of first class.

[redbird]

Purely a guess, but maybe those four Americans were a family or group of friends traveling together?

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

Article mentions that three of the Americans killed were Boeing employees working on one project, so seems quite likely that those three at least would've been near one another.

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

People in an organized tour tend to be seated together, also, and tours tend to cluster nationalities---i.e., a tour may have a large proportion of Germans, some Brits, a few Scandinavians, fewer from North America, and there's usually a stray Kiwi or Australian.

[ckd]

There's a survival/injury/fatality diagram on page 180 of the accident report[1]. The 5 passenger fatalities were all in the first three rows of the aircraft which seems to be the business class section; it's not unlikely that all of the Americans were sitting there if they were a group traveling for business.

[1] http://www.onderzoeksraad.nl/docs/rapporten/Rapport_TA_ENG_web.pdf

[botia.livejournal.com]

Some of the Americans were coworkers and worked at Boeing, so there likely was a cluster of them sitting together, probably in first or business class seats.

[botia.livejournal.com]

From the Wikipedia link you posted:
Four [of the fatalities] were Americans, of whom three have been identified as Boeing employees stationed in Ankara and working on an Airborne Early Warning and Control program for the Turkish military.