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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."
Don't get on one. Every time I have in the last few years one of the following happens:
The MythBusters say it is the rear facing flight attendant seat in the back of the plane.2 )#Escape Slide Parachute
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MythBusters_(season_
Aortic dissection. This is what kills you. It's the most common, lethal deceleration injury. Of course if you're going fast enough you're simply crushed, but at "lower" speeds a sudden deceleration is enough to rotate the heart (which is fairly mobile in the chest) and rip it off the aorta (which is fixed to the posterior chest wall). The arteriovenous ligament doesn't help, either. So the aorta ruptures and you die of a cardiac tamponade. Oh and this is how Princess Diana died.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Because that would be boring:
- Don't drive while drunk
- Don't drive while tired
- Don't call while driving
- Don't verbally fight while driving
- Don't speed
- Fasten seatbelts
- No sex while driving
Who want's to read that, heh?!
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
20 plane crashes is a bit different than 20 car crashes. Lets say the least populated plane had 150 people on board - thats a sample size of 3,000 people. Now compare that to a car with four people in it (extremely rare from what I've seen, but what the hell) - 80 people. Yup.
"Aortic dissection. This is what kills you. It's the most common, lethal deceleration injury. Of course if you're going fast enough you're simply crushed, but at "lower" speeds a sudden deceleration is enough to rotate the heart (which is fairly mobile in the chest) and rip it off the aorta (which is fixed to the posterior chest wall). The arteriovenous ligament doesn't help, either. So the aorta ruptures and you die of a cardiac tamponade. Oh and this is how Princess Diana died."
They wanted to install seats facing backwards in airplanes specifically to reduce the deaths from the initial crash. Howver, they determined that the flying public wouldn't accept rear-facing seats. Considering all the BS the flying public puts up with nowadyas, maybe its time to float the idea again.
Oh, another Princess Di joke - "I heard Princess Di was on the radio... And the dash. And the seat ..."
When you sit in the back, it takes longer to get off of the plane because you have to wait for all the bozos in front of you to fumble for their personal belongings. I'd say that a conservative estimate is an average of 5 extra minutes. So before your first expected crash, you'd waste 5 * 7,000,000 minutes, or 66 solid years waiting at the back of planes. So to save each life, you're essentially using up an entire lifetime standing hunched over watching old codgers wrestle with their suitcases. (It's actually much worse than that, because only a fraction of fatal crashes even have a difference in outcome between the front and the back. A lot of times, everybody dies and sitting in the back doesn't help anyway.)
You are still more likely to be involved in a fatal car crash that you can't do anything about than you are to be involved in an air accident. To think more clearly about it, think *only* of the probability of dying in a crash you can't control -- you're still in more danger in a car.
Obviously the physics involved in doing this for large commercial aircraft is just slightly more difficult. But by the same means, car air bags were first envisioned decades before they became possible - and really only in recent years with smart airbags that sense & adjust based on the occupants weight, seat position & whether he's wearing a seatbelt have they really become most beneficial. Commercial aircraft parachute/drag systems just seems like a no-brainer that at some point would be a solvable problem if not today.
Vote Quimby.
Its almost 20 years ago when I set in class in aircraft mechanics school and we studied the plans for some commercial airliners. Our teacher asked us what we thought to be the safest place in those aircraft.
After accepting several gueses he showed us the easy way to determain the safest seats. He pointed out the location of the black box in all aircraft. They all where in the back section near the tail.
At that time there where still smoking sections and these where all at the back of the aircraft (has to do with the ventilaton). So smoking was safer in the 80's if you did a lot of airtravel!
Aortic dissection. This is what kills you. It's the most common, lethal deceleration injury. Of course if you're going fast enough you're simply crushed, but at "lower" speeds a sudden deceleration is enough to rotate the heart (which is fairly mobile in the chest) and rip it off the aorta (which is fixed to the posterior chest wall). The arteriovenous ligament doesn't help, either. So the aorta ruptures and you die of a cardiac tamponade. Oh and this is how Princess Diana died.
That's a good story. I wonder if it's true.
By a strange coincidence (only on Slashdot), I just went to a conference on aortic surgery. And I used to edit the Stapp Car Crash Conference Proceedings in the 1970s (great series) and I remember at least one article on aortic damage.
Bottom line: Most of the aortic damage in automobile collisions occurs to people who weren't wearing their seat belts. Those lap and shoulder belts (which the U.S. auto companies refused to install until 1967) really work well. You can thank Ralph Nader for saving about 25,000 lives a year. The auto companies also made steering columns that were positioned exactly right and strong enough to impale the driver's chest, often with a heart puncture. Thanks to Ralph Nader, they replaced them with a collapsable steering column around 1967.
Let's see the latest stuff, um, http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/332/6/356 Smith MD et al, Transesophageal Echocardiography in the Diagnosis of Traumatic Rupture of the Aorta, N Engl J Med 1995 332:356-362. (Well worth reading; great X-rays.) 7 were not restrained, 2 were. Smith says:
Whaddya know, the poster has a point. Aortic trauma is still a major cause of automobile fatalties, usually but not always when people aren't wearing seat belts (Diana wasn't).
But wait, Smith also says,
I forget how to do the equations, but as I recall when a car collides against a solid barrier at 50mph, it has about 50 inches of crush space in which to come to a halt, and that comes to about 50g, which everybody told me is survivable. (One of you young whippersnappers can check my numbers.) John Paul Stapp tested it himself on his rocket sled and lived. But if you subjected 100 people to 50g, I don't know how many of them would get aortic rupture.
The other major cause of death (mostly to people who aren't wearing seat belts) is head injury. Thanks to Ralph Nader, those windshields are carefully designed with plastic laminate that has just the right elasticity to bring a passenger's head to a stop with low enough force to avoid breaking his
I'd rather be in the 56% section behind first class. It's close to the exits. The noise level is lower in front of the wing. And the 69% section behind the wing are probably all going to be covered in flaming fuel from the wing tanks anyway.
Plus, you can check out all the hotties on your walk to and from the bathroom at the back.
That is total bullshit. Airplanes have problems happen constantly. You just never hear about them because they're incredibly robust systems with multiple redundancies and the problems never even become apparent to the passengers the vast majority of the time.
Even when the problems do become apparent to the passengers, the vast likelihood is that they will not die. Airliners can experience a loss of an engine, a partial loss of control, hydraulic leak, landing gear failing to retract or extend, run off the end of a runway, and many other serious problems without actually killing anyone inside. And this happens, and much more frequently than fatal accidents.
Even when fatal accidents do happen, many people in the airplane survive. That is, oddly enough, the entire point of the article we are commenting on; some seats are more likely to survive than others. It would be hard to deduce this if you were "almost guaranteed to die", wouldn't it?
The problem is that you get all of your information on these things from the evening news, which only reports the big ones because those are the only ones which sell eyeballs.
Every engineer should read this book. (The Wikipedia entry sucks BTW.)
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
Thomas Schelling, the Nobel laureate in economics, said that 9/11 is three months of auto fatalities, and more people die every year in bathtubs.
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. I'd compare Nader to Michael Moore. Sicko is also dramatic and slightly overstated, but its facts are basically right. Same with Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth.
I believe that scientists and engineers, technical people generally -- like the ones who read Slashdot -- have a special obligation to look at the facts, because they can understand the science better than most people.
They should also look at the politics behind the science (as Nobel laureate chemist Mario Molina said), because all your science doesn't mean shit if some stupid corporate shill like George W. Bush can brush it off.
When they start ridiculing Nader and Moore and Gore, that's when, instead of joining in, you have to look at the facts. These corporations are spending billions of dollars to put one over on you, and if you fall for it, they'll be laughing at you too.
The point Nader and Moore and Gore are making is that there's a problem with democracy when these wealthy interest groups are running the country, and we have to take it back.