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Safest Seat on a Plane, Or How to Survive a Crash

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the law-of-averages dept.

Ant writes "Popular Mechanics shares a short article on an exclusive look at 36 years' worth of National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) reports and seating charts to determine the best way to live through a disaster in the sky. Move to the back of the Airbus."

22 of 454 comments (clear)

  1. If there's one bit of mysticism I believe.. by QuantumG · · Score: 5, Insightful

    it's that if your time has come there's nothing you can do.

    Which is good, cause it fits in nicely with a bit of wisdom that a lot of people should take to heart:

    don't worry about stuff you have no control over.

    --
    How we know is more important than what we know.
    1. Re:If there's one bit of mysticism I believe.. by Deadstick · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Yeah, well, if your airplane gets in trouble you'd better hope the pilot doesn't believe that.

      rj

    2. Re:If there's one bit of mysticism I believe.. by SRA8 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      >> don't worry about stuff you have no control over.

      Which is exactly the point of this article -- you DO have some control over survival!

    3. Re:If there's one bit of mysticism I believe.. by qazsedcft · · Score: 3, Insightful

      But the pilot does have control over the plane.

      Now back to the actual point. The GP wrote "if your time has come". This outcome is not determinable in advance. If you die in a crash then your time has come. If you survive then your time has not come. This is kind of like Schrodinger's cat.

  2. What are the odds? by slughead · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The odds of dying in a plane crash are 1 in 5,051 in your whole lifetime. To give you some perspective, you're 5 times more likely to drown, 23 times more likely to fall to your death, and 60 times more likely to die in a car accident.

    Therefore, a far more useful article would be "How to survive driving off a seaside cliff into the ocean."

    --
    Latewire
    1. Re:What are the odds? by nerdonamotorcycle · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Indeed. You're way more likely to die as a result of the cab ride to the airport.

    2. Re:What are the odds? by jointm1k · · Score: 2, Insightful

      . . . and 60 times more likely to die in a car accident.

      That's only because the average human does a whole lot less traveling by plane than he does by car.

      --
      You know it makes sense, a little reminder from jointm1k.
    3. Re:What are the odds? by dkleinsc · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I tend to view the issue with plane crashes (and terrorism, which is even more ridiculously unlikely) is the loss of control. With cars, if you're driving, you feel like you're in control of the vehicle, and by extension the situation, and thus feel safer. Even if you have a friend driving, you now have someone you (probably) trust in control of the situation.

      By contrast, in a plane, you're totally at the mercy of the pilots and air traffic controllers. You don't know them, and you know that if they screw up there's pretty close to nothing you can do about it. So even if the risk is actually less, it appears to be greater, because you are giving up control over whether you live or die.

      --
      I am officially gone from /. Long live http://www.soylentnews.com/
    4. Re:What are the odds? by Deadstick · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Because if we flew airplanes like most people drive cars, we'd die like flies.

      rj

    5. Re:What are the odds? by dal20402 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      PItch motions are usually pretty gentle in airliners. Roll motions can be more severe, especially in widebodies. Sit closer to the centerline. On a one-aisle plane, sit in an aisle seat; on a two-aisle plane, sit in the middle bank of seats (a center seat is best). That said, sitting close to the wing isn't a bad idea either.

    6. Re:What are the odds? by dal20402 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      There are no parachutes on airliners for the following reasons:

      1. Parachutes are heavy, so a plane equipped with them could carry less cargo or passengers and ticket prices would go up.

      2. Parachutes are very complex to pack, and would have to be unpacked, inspected, and repacked at regular maintenance intervals, at considerable expense (not to mention increased time out of service for the plane).

      3. If the plane is high enough that parachutes will be of any use, it's impossible to open most exit doors as pressure seals them against the inside of the fuselage.

      4. Only a tiny fraction of passengers would understand how to use parachutes. When all the others slam into the ground at terminal velocity -- especially if the plane somehow survives -- it's a brave new world of stupendously huge liability for the airline.

    7. Re:What are the odds? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Absolute rubbish. read the wikipedia page on Aortic dissection - nothing there about rapid deceleration being the common cause.
      The most common form of death on an airplane is fire/smoke inhalation, unless people are simply crushed of course. The G-forces in most crashes are far less than those experienced in a car crash, and easily survivable. Aircraft are large and compress slowly.

    8. Re:What are the odds? by Fastolfe · · Score: 3, Insightful

      While I agree that those four issues are relatively weak (but still important when costing solutions for the problem), the biggest problem with parachutes is that exceedingly few air accidents occur in a manner that allows parachutes to be useful. If you suffer a catastrophic failure mid-flight, it's unlikely that you're going to have time to get parachutes on everyone and get them all out the door, even assuming the plane is continuing to fly straight and level (imagine trying to accomplish this while you're spiraling toward the ground). If you do have time to do all of that, then the plane really isn't in that bad of shape and it's more likely that the landing will be safer, even if it's unpowered with some critical systems failed, than throwing everyone out the door to fend for themselves.

      For accidents that occur during landing or just after take-off, even ignoring the time factor, your altitude is far too low to safely bail out.

      There could be some scenarios where parachutes would save lives, and the crew would be in a position to know that parachutes would be safer than trying to land, but I rather suspect these scenarios are going to be rare.

      At some point you have to ask yourself if the odds of this solution saving lives justify the enormous costs of implementing it.

    9. Re:What are the odds? by SoupIsGoodFood_42 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      That's interesting about Nader -- I did see a book about this once, but didn't read it. If this event and 9/11 had happened around the same time, Nader would have been laughed at compared to The Evils of Terrorism. While 3000 people dying in one year is a tragedy that would be great to avoid, obviously, 25,000 a year is a greater tragedy, yet undoubtedly, out of many who don't make their kids wear a seatbelt, some probably think the dangers of terrorism are so great that they support war to stop it.

      It really does put things into perspective. Nader deserves a lot more respect than being the butt of many jokes, especially compared to what his opponents have achieved.

  3. Re:Easy answer... by FieroEtnl · · Score: 2, Insightful

    So you would rather drive for three days to cross the country rather than fly for one? Given what gas prices are like now, you'd probably end up spending more on the car trip than the plane, and you'd be spending an extra couple of days traveling. I think I'll take my chances with the sick people and potential delays.

  4. Re:It's safer in the back and... by I'll+Provide+The+War · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Have you been to America lately? The only thing you would be watching here is a BBW walking sideways just to fit down the aisle.

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/ne ws/2007/07/19/wfat119.xml

    This is absurd to concern oneself with anyway since the death rate for commercial air travel is around 0.14 per billion miles. The death rate for automobile travel is 11,350% higher.

    http://www.dallasfed.org/fed/annual/2001/ar01f.htm l

  5. Worry about something else by Kohath · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If you're really worried about a plane crash, I suggest staying home. Maybe don't get out of bed at all.

    Watching and reading the news is your real problem. Things that happen on the news are extremely unlikely to happen to you. That's why you never see headlines like "Jill Larson Goes to the Market. Buys Coffee. (Subtitle: Coffee purchase exceeds analysts' expectations by 100%)"

    That's all. I have to go to the market. But I'm not buying coffee, so no commercial airliners will crash today.

  6. The real answer is different by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful
    Deep vein thrombosis is more dangerous to travellers than crashes. In that light the answer to the safest place to sit is; choose an aisle seat. http://www.pacificislandtravel.com/airlines/deepve inthrombosis.html

    With over 1 million passengers at any one time in the air and up to 10% medically unfit to fly, according to one estimate, problems both minor and serious are just as likely to happen at 7000 ft. as on the ground. Regardless of whether you are sitting in an airplane high in the sky or on the ground at the movies - one is suscptible to DVT, because the rate of blood flow to your lower limbs is reduced by about two thirds. According to sme estimates, there are about 2,000 passengers that die from the condition every year. "The airlines are not in the business of scaring people, " says Andrew Keller, Director of the Airport Medical Centre at Sydney's Kingsford Smith airport, who sees one person a day with leg swelling and perhaps one every two months with actual DVT. "There's always the risk of a terrorist boarding an aircraft: do you warn passengers about that too?"

    http://www.karinya.com/dvt.htm

    It used to be (on the airlines I travelled on, I don't travel any more) that the bulkhead seats had significantly more leg room. That made them easier to get into and out of. It also made it easier to keep my legs moving.
  7. Re:It's safer in the back and... by Climate+Shill · · Score: 3, Insightful

    This is absurd to concern oneself with anyway since the death rate for commercial air travel is around 0.14 per billion miles. The death rate for automobile travel is 11,350% higher.

    If I die, the fact that I've travelled a large distance in the process will hardly be much of a consolation.

    Replacing deaths/mile by deaths/hour gives figures far less different.

  8. Re:It's safer in the back and... by Dun+Malg · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Replacing deaths/mile by deaths/hour gives figures far less different.

    .87 deaths per billion passenger-miles for airplane vs 11.7 for automobile. Still more than an order of magnitude greater, and people normally cover far more miles by car than by air in their lives.

    But even at that, statistics are largely irrelevant on an individual scale. Statistically, you can say that every time someone flies on a plane, they lose 15 minutes off their life. This is, however, only true in the aggregate, as the loss is not spread across all passengers, but rather concentrated in those rare instances when 150 people lose an average of 30-odd years each all at once because they died in a plane crash.
    --
    If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
  9. Re:Excuse me... by fermion · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Yeah, and this is likely the least of their troubles. The data was basically 50/50, and they did not show that 5% difference was significant.

    Given thier analysis, and what often happens in a plane crash, this is what I think might be a more reasonable conclusion.

    In the event of a passenger jet crash, probability is that everyone will die. If everyone does not die, the statistics still favor a majority of the passengers being killed in the crash.

    The analysis in the paper appears to show a slightly higher probability of survival in the back of the plane, but did not show that the level was statistically significant. In the other cases the was not a clear effect of seat position, and often the back of the plane appeared to be preferentially fatal.

    So, in summary, the passenger jet is not likely to crash. In the few cases where a crash does occur, and fatalities ensue, then there are not, on average, going to be many survivors. In the extremely rare case that jet crashes and there are survivors, a passenger may be safer up back, unless it is one of those cases where you are safe in front. Therefore, the best thing to do is sit somewhere in the middle.

    --
    "She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
  10. Re:The MythBusters say it is the by mykdavies · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The MythBusters say it is the rear facing flight attendant seat in the back of the plane. Without having seen the episode in question, I'd imagine that all that they could reasonably show is that a sober and alert member of cabin crew who has been through extensive training in how to survive emergency situations and is sitting in the rear facing flight attendant seat in the back of the plane is most likely to survive.
    --
    The world has changed and we all have become metal men.