I would name all the passengers, then have the blackout occur while the plane is going down.... that way you can setPos the passengers out of the plane while it crashes.
I did something similar with a helo crash cut scene I made once for an intro. Had the helo flying along, and camcreated a couple of shells behind it and to the left, once the explosion happened I ran the tail rotor failure script and watched the helo spin towards some trees.
Then I faded to black while the helo was still falling and setPos'd the passengers away, let the helo crash, deleted the crashed helo and replaced it with a crashed helo addon (always looks much better). Then setpos'd the passengers back around the helo and killed some
Fade back in.... and BLAMMO !!!! One Helo crash that you narrowly survived.