1 It's not presence of mind, it's dash-cams. Increasingly popular everywhere outside the US, and I think they'll become popular here, too.

2 The images are from a dash-cam video.  For some reason, it's more terrifying to me than the 747 crash from last year.  Probably hearing the surprised scream from the driver/passenger/whichever...

3 Ace found another youtube, which is even worse. (The car is closer.)

4 It's been marked as private.  Was it this one?  I just found it myself.

5 The plane's wing actually hit the taxicab on the highway. The driver and passenger are fine, but the front of the taxi looks about what you would expect. All in all, this crash could have been so much worse.

6 When I posted it, that youtube wasn't private. It's narrow and it's in B/W. I'm sure it will emerge somewhere.

7 Here it is.

8 Here's the taxi. A few milliseconds difference and they would both be dead.

9 My Russian dashcam is mostly taking videos of bicyclists driving against the traffic, but nothing this exciting.

10 Russian dash cam is mostly as a self insurance against insurance fraud.  If someone purposely try to get you into accident for insurance money, you have video proof otherwise.  

11 There were at least three cars going in the same direction which had dash cams and caught that plane coming towards them. I wonder why we haven't seen any at all from a car going the other direction?

12 Traffic lights create clusters.

13 It looks like that was a highway.

14 For some strange reason, I had flashbacks of American Airlines Flight 191, which dropped an engine on takeoff, rolled and crashed just north of O'Hare International.

15

This one kept its engines, but reportedly the pilots radioed that one of their engines had flamed out. (Based on the video, probably the port side engine.)

When there are two engines, mounted as widely apart as those were, and one of them goes out rapidly and unexpectedly, then there's a strong tendency for the aircraft to roll towards the dead engine if the pilots don't react fast enough with the rudder. If it happens while you're close to the ground, there probably isn't time to recover, and you'd get exactly the crash we saw.

16

Actually, BOTH engines went out.

There may have been a huge, a monstrous pilot error.

17 It happened before a few times. For example, in crash of C-5 in 2006.

18 Didn't take long for the C-word being thrown by pros

"Hurry up" culture in that part of the world - the faster the better.

The sad thing is that you really need do nothing after a flameout except retract the gear; the prop autofeathers. All you need to do is keep control and climb. If the engine isn't burning it need not be secured until you're at a safe altitude.

Instead, we get an immediate mayday call followed by an unintentional engine shutdown.

A bootfull of rudder is apparently beneath menthon in the description of the procedure. ATR, coming from the Euro school of design, may even have autotrim.

19 Pete, I can't figure out which word you're talking about.

20

OK, that articleI linked to contains much more specific info now than when I linked to it originally.

The starboard engine flamed out, and the pilot responded by shutting down the port-side engine.

(I wish someone would cue that writer that you don't use the words "left" and "right" when talking about planes and ships.)

21 I mean the "culture". They harp on it every time when an Asian carrier crashes. Sometimes it turns out relevant (like in AirAsia 214 case), but usually not.

22

Aircraft crashes are always spectacular, of course, but it's easy to fall for the "misleading vividness" fallacy.

There are tens of thousands of heavy aircraft out there most of which fly nearly every day. Millions of flights every year and in a typical year there may be three or four crashes. A few hundred people a year die this way, compared (for instance) to many thousands who die in car accidents.

And occasionally you get an aircraft failure where everyone walks away.