The food trolley is the second most consistently cited factor. The heavy metal food service cart that was pinned against her in the wreckage is understood to have served two possible functions: it may have kept her from being expelled from the aircraft when it broke apart, and it may have absorbed or distributed some of the impact forces when the fuselage section hit the ground. Neither of these roles is precisely quantifiable from the available evidence.
The terrain is the third factor. The fuselage section came to rest on a wooded, snow-covered slope. Snow is a compressible medium that absorbs impact energy over a greater distance than hard surfaces, reducing the peak deceleration force applied to a body within the wreckage. Forested terrain may have further absorbed energy as the section came through tree cover before final impact. These are factors that could plausibly reduce the violence of the final impact below the threshold that the already-damaged human body within the section could survive.
The slope angle is occasionally mentioned in accounts of the crash — the possibility that the section struck the slope at an angle that allowed it to skid and decelerate rather than stopping abruptly, further extending the deceleration over time and distance and reducing peak forces.
Each of these factors is plausible. None of them, individually or collectively, represents a clinically verified causal account of her survival. The most accurate framing remains the one she herself has offered in interviews: something about the specific combination of factors that were present on that day, in that place, in that body, produced an outcome that medical and physical analysis can identify contributing variables for but cannot fully explain.