..... Those passengers were lucky as hell to survive....
While certainly luck always plays a role, it is also true that your odds of surviving a crash have been getting much better over the years. This is due to mandated changes in aircraft design to improve crash survivability.
Asiana crash: Improved technology, standards, and training likely saved livesNearly all passengers and crew survived the Asiana crash – 305 of the 307 people onboard – and more than a third were able to leave without hospitalization. .......
The statistics aren’t a rarity in the world of recent plane crashes. As The Wall Street Journal notes, “Everyone survived a 2008 Continental Airlines flight that veered off a Denver runway in high winds, splitting the body of the jet in two. Two passengers died in August 2010 when an Aires Boeing 737 landed short in bad weather at a Caribbean island, also splitting the passenger cabin into pieces. In April, a newly delivered Lion Air Boeing 737 crashed in poor visibility short of a runway in Bali, Indonesia; all 108 people aboard survived.”
Also remember the "Miracle on the Hudson" crash, where everyone survived without serious injury.
In the late 1980s, regulators required that all new passenger planes have seats able to withstand impacts that thrust them forward at 16 times the force of gravity. In 2005 the Federal Aviation Administration ordered the standard be applied to almost all passenger planes by October 2009. A Boeing spokesman told The Wall Street Journal that the company has been delivering all its jets with 16-G-rated seats since 2009.
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Other technological advances included better materials for the fuselage, Todd Curtis, a former safety engineer with Boeing and now a director of the Airsafe.com Foundation, told The Washington Post. "It may have been worse if that fuselage had been designed with practices that were common 20 or 30 years prior."
Other articles have discussed how much stronger the fuselage is in today's aircraft.
Mr. Hansman told USA Today that a crucial safety requirement is that airlines must certify they can get passengers off a plane within 90 seconds in an emergency, even if half the doors and escape slides are blocked. But getting people to leave their luggage and laptops can be a problem, Hansman said.
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The use of better fire-resistant materials on seats and other parts of the cabin also contribute to fires burning with less intensity at first, allowing crucial time for evacuation, according to Hiatt of the Flight Safety Foundation.
Note that even with the delay in ordering evacuation, all the passengers were able to get out
before the aircraft burned.
Some crashes are not survivable, for example if your plane flys straight into cumulo granite clouds, everyone will die instantly. However, the vast majority of crashes are during take off and landing. Better aircraft design, together with your own awareness of how to survive, greatly improve your odds over what they were even 10 years ago.
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