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

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."

Comments

If there's one bit of mysticism I believe..

[QuantumG]

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.

Re:If there's one bit of mysticism I believe..

[Deadstick]

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

rj

What are the odds?

[slughead]

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."

Re:What are the odds?

[nerdonamotorcycle]

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

Re:What are the odds?

[dkleinsc]

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.

Re:What are the odds?

[dal20402]

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.

Worry about something else

[Kohath]

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.

Re:It's safer in the back and...

[Dun Malg]

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.

Re:Excuse me...

[fermion]

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.