Slashdot Mirror
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."
you're by the bathrooms and you can watch any hottie walk back to her seat.
Don't get on one. Every time I have in the last few years one of the following happens:
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.
Rarely does an airplane back into the side of a mountain.
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
..an entertaining read I bumped into a couple of months back, describing how to survive a freefall from 35'000 feet...
/Rundstykke
http://www.greenharbor.com/fffolder/carkeet.html
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.
The BBC did a documentary on this...and...
The best place is "near an exit door".
Statistically, most crashes are survivable if you can get out. The biggest impediment to getting out is the number of other people between you and the door. The ones who don't get out die of smoke/fire.
No sig today...
provided you aren't driving. That is much more important question. Or even better yet, why in the hell are SUVs legal? An ever better question that can save many more lives!
Monstar L
... where all but one of the survivors from the tail section so far as been kidnapped or murdered.
So, they are working off of a sample size of twenty??? Not sure if I would draw too many conclusions from this dataset.
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_
to get a seat inside the black box?
...just reboot and you should be fine.
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
All those arrogant dicks in first class get to die first.
So, the back of the plane is safest, and that's where they put the smokers?
You'd think they'd put those who want to commit slow suicide in the nose or something, just to help them speed things along.
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.
being in a plane that disintegrates in mid-air, falling onto a road, getting hit by a car whilst it's raining where I drown in a deep water-filled pothole. That's what's got me most concerned.
I guess being in first class isn't that much more advantageous.
You are a little over sensitive.
"Move to the back of the bus." is a common phrase in America.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
That's where the snakes are!
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
As a regular flier in cattle-class, i'd just like to say that its nice to see first class passengers getting the preferential treatment they deserve. First on, first off and first into the mountainside...
not like the passengers in his car, screaming and yelling
I like microcars
The safest seat in a crash is probably a window seat so God can better hear your pleas for him to save you.
I'm almost afraid to ask what the survival rate is for the people sitting up in FRONT of first class... I mean, they're the important ones! They deserve to live! (Though, I guess perhaps the alcohol will soften the blow a bit).
On Lost, the ones towards the back were the first to be picked off by "the others." Only the front seats for me!
C'est honky - it's a noir thing.
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.)
Are you kidding?
The damn tails fall off of Airbus planes.
Then they blame the pilot for being hard on the rudder. And some worthless US government functionary leans over forwards to appear fair, and goes along with blaming the dead pilot.
The pilot can dance a jig on the rudder pedals and the damn rudder should not fall off!
I have never been on a Airbus, and will try hard never to be on an Airbus.
They're cheap glued-together crap. Obviously the result of committees representing *multiple* socialist governments. Perhaps the second-worst way to design a passenger plane. The worst is a committee of a single big communist government.
Sure, the '37 had some rudder reversal issues a decade ago, but they did not come unglued during the excursions. Shareholders have limited patience, unlike governments.
And you'll not smear me with "xenophobia" or whatever the current socialist excuse for not thinking is. I'd get on a Japanese jumbo with no worries whatsoever, if they made any.
Here's hoping that Japan starts building heavy bombers and their civilian spin-off passenger liners. *Clink!*
Until then,
It's Boeing or I ain't going.
"and 60 times more likely to die in a car accident."
Given I use my car everyday and I fly about twice a year max (and that probably roughly applies to a lot of people) it would seem to me that my car is actually safer than the plane. In fact you could say that for most people the safest method of transport is the space shuttle since hardly anyone will ever travel in it!
Okay, so it would work up to a point. The 'point' being the airliner that crashes into your house.
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
don't worry about stuff you have no control over
Usually when I fly I'm in the pilot's seat. Is this:
(1) good because I have control, or:
(2) bad because having control means I should worry?
This comment likely has nothing to do with Airbus vs. Boeing safety statistics. You may recall the early 1960's in the US when the back of the bus was a stigmatized area. Blacks in back, whites rode up front. The phrase "(Move to the) Back of the bus, Rosa" still gets thrown around as a racial joke in my area, although rarely in seriousness. I believe the submitter was attempting to create a witty wordplay which was lost on many Slashdotters.
khasim (12/9/06): In a blind taste test, more people preferred Coke over the Pepsi that I had previously pissed in.
--EXT: PLANE FLYING OVERHEAD
--INT: PLANE COCKPIT
PILOT #1: Oh wow, I really hope we don't have a crash.
PILOT #2: Me too.
PILOT #1: But they say it's safer than crossing the road!
PILOT #2: Yes, but we have to do that too.
PILOT #1: Best not to think about it.
--EXT: OUTSIDE HOUSE
RICK: Oh no! That plane is going to crash on us!
[Shots of each of the four lads looking up: MIKE, RICK and NEIL with concern, VYVYAN with excitement.]
[KA-BOOOOM!]
Does this mean that an Airbus is more likely to crash than a Boeing ?
Actually it probably does. Boeing has a lot of corporate history to draw on when it comes to making aircraft that can survive serious failures and still keep flying -- a lot of this came from analysis of flak damage to returning bombers during WW-II. Areas that were never damaged on returning aircraft indicated an area that was particularly vulnerable (if the plane got hit there, it didn't come back), and they'd design around whatever the weakness was (typically by adding another layer of redundancy). This leads to robustness against certain kinds of accidents (e.g. a DC-10 crash caused because a cargo door failure ripped up all three "redundant" hydraulic lines to the tail, as they passed through the same area. A similar class Boeing aircraft used four lines, with no one location containing all four. And yes, I know a DC-10 is not an Airbus.)
I'm certainly not aware of any Boeing crashes caused by software failure, which can't be said for Airbus.
That said, I've never changed a flight just because the designated equipment was an Airbus.
-- Alastair
Agreed! But look closer: FTFA:
REALITY: It's Safer In the Back.The funny thing about all those expert opinions: They're not really based on hard data about actual airline accidents. A look at real-world crash stats, however, suggests that the farther back you sit, the better your odds of survival. Passengers near the tail of a plane are about 40 percent more likely to survive a crash than those in the first few rows up front.
That's the conclusion of an exclusive Popular Mechanics study that examined every commercial jet crash in the United States, since 1971, that had both fatalities and survivors. The raw data from these 20 accidents has been languishing for decades in National Transportation Safety Board files, waiting to be analyzed by anyone curious enough to look and willing to do the statistical drudgework.
What *I* would like to see: a comparison of severity of injury vs seating location. They used only two statistical baskets: dead or not-dead.
How many survived UNinjured? Where were THEIR seats? Of those who were injured, how severe were the injuries, and where were THEY seated? Sure, there's a gray area there, but isn't that what is done with triage? (see: triage, Simple Triage And Rapid Treatment, and also Emergency department).
For example, the article states a survival rate of 56 percent in the section behind first/business class and ahead of the wing and the SAME 56 percent survival rate for those in the section OVER the wing. (See the picture.) And were the various injuries equally distributed, too? What about burns? (Isn't the jet fuel primarily stored in the wings? Hmmm, how many of the crashes were on takeoff, during flight, or during landing?)
So, I commend them for taking this first look at the data, but I would love to see them perform a follow-up analysis. Ideally, publishing the data they found in machine-readable form for others who are interested to perform more in-depth analysis.
To quote the article, In 11 of the 20 crashes, rear passengers clearly fared better. What kind of statistical analysis is this? If they are going to publish something with as broad a claim about an enormous industry as airlines, they need to back their claims up. That means t-tests, multiple ANOVA, chi-square tests, etc.
But most importantly, that means stating their p-values! With a sample size as low as 20, I wouldn't be surprised if the statistical significance of this data is null (that is, the likelihood of being wrong is greater than the likelihood of being right).
Until they publish that number, I will take this study with a grain of salt.
I don't know where you got your information from, but Airbus is consortium of aviation companies owned by EADS which answers to stockholders, not any socialist government.
Check the wikipedia entry for EADS
moi
I still think you're thinking about this too much. Do you ever ride the bus? when you get on you are expected to move to the back of the bus so more people can keep getting on. The phrase is that simple.
Anywhere that isn't next to an engine. In an MD-80 with the engines in the rear the last place I want to be is sitting next to them so the blades can fly off and slice me in half. I thought I remembered hearing that this is what happened to that ValuJet DC-9 that crashed in the everglades. On a 777 I'll prefer the back to the middle for the same reason.
But the real answer of course is that the best place to be is in the section with the free booze. At least then you can be numb when the inevitable happens.
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!
you can bet I'd be trying to pull the nose of the plane up as we went down.
> A similar class Boeing aircraft used four lines, with no one location containing all four lines
As an all-round geek and TriStar fan, I'd point out that the Lockheed L1011 had similar redundancy, with none of the hydraulic systems all coming together in the same place. There's a reason they call the DC-10 the 'Death Cruiser."
>I'm certainly not aware of any Boeing crashes caused by software failure, which can't be said for Airbus.
I'd challenge you to find a crash of an A320 or later (A300 and A310 are not fly by wire) that was caused by a _combination_ of pilot error and some idiosynchracies in the flight control software (such as AF296, here). And in case you think I'm being anti-pilot, "why yes, I am a pilot." (Commercial Single and Multi Engine Land, Instrument Airplane.)
JG
-- "...I'm a bad guy because I, well, I sing some rock-and-roll songs." M. Manson
Well, we all like to laugh about the "first class dicks" dying first, but I wonder if there just might be some kind of connection between the (1) first, luxurious, prestigious, pride-of-the-airline class having a higher statistical danger, (2) placement of the aforementioned class always in the front of the plane, and (3) multiple airlines repeatedly stating that there is NO safety difference between front and back.
Nah, I'm just being paranoid, right?
Why would anyone be anti-EU?
It's not like people from the EU get offended and complain about meaningless phrases mentioning Airbus. It's not like EU folks are sitting at their computers, anxious to call anyone xenophobic with no good reason. It's a good thing no one in the EU is like that, because it's really annoying.
Stay OFF the Airbus! Take the train or a boat. What's the hurry?
What?
Interesting study. But described in a misleading way.
In particular, since they only looked at accidents with some deaths and some survivors, you can't compare the risks or make intelligent tradeoffs.
Naive readers might assume that if 49% survive in the front but 69% survive in the rear, then you are 69/49=1.4 times more likely to live in the back.
But most fatal plane accidents result in everyone dying and those were left out. So the difference is much less. And they don't help you find out how much less.
Unanswered questions:
* how many totally-fatal accidents happened over that period of time?
* how many people died in the ones they studied?
* how many people died if you include all the accidents?
And for another study:
* what about injuries - did those vary by location?
Some information on some of the years is at
http://www.ntsb.gov/aviation/Table6.htm
--Neal
Go IETF!
I once saw Daffy Duck doomed to certain death as the elevator he was in plummetted earthwards. When it was about 3 feet above the ground, he simply stepped out, leaving it to crash and be pulverised.
Stick Men
From TFA: "...So when the "experts" tell you it doesn't matter where you sit, have a chuckle and head for the back of the plane. And once your seatbelt is firmly fastened, relax: There's been just one fatal jet crash in the U.S. in the last five-plus years"
1 jet crash in the last "five-plus" years? Doesn't five-plus = five or more?
I'm pretty sure that there has been more than one fatal crash in the last "five or more" years, no?
Perhaps he meant "slightly more than five"?
-Styopa
I'm going to go out on a limb and generalize that in almost any mode of transportation those in the rear of the vehicle will tend to survive more often than those in the front.
My reasoning is that there is simply more stuff in front of you to absorb the impact energy and allow your body to decelerate more gradually. Most collisions occur because the vehicle impacts something and that something is almost always in front of the vehicle. Even if a train derails, you'll almost always see that the front cars are in a heap and the rear cars are sitting politely on the rails like noting happened.
As in most things in life, the more "stuff" you have between you and the potential impactor, the better off you'll be.
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
Yeah, as it was in South Africa not too long ago.
Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard disk?
If the thing's burning you need to get out fast, and "at the back" is a long way from the exit doors (and a lot of panicky old people in between).
This study is very basic - only front/back.
Get the BBC program called "how to survive an air crash" (or something like that) off your local P2P, it's much more details. IIRC most people who survived air crashes were within seven rows of an exit door.
No sig today...
From TFA: "So when the "experts" tell you it doesn't matter where you sit, have a chuckle and head for the back of the plane. And once your seatbelt is firmly fastened, relax: There's been just one fatal jet crash in the U.S. in the last five-plus years."
Thats good to know, specially when I live in Brazil.
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.
And I would challenge you to prove the FAA and EASA do not have a vested interest in covering up issues.
In particular, I was thinking of the European investigation of the airbus airshow crash blamed it on "pilot error". At the time of the investigation, the Air France captain was saying that the craft would not respond to him, and yet, the then forming EASA stated that it was pilot error. Likewise, the tail issue in the 737 took a probable couple of crashes before it was being investigated. In particular, the c.springs crash of a 737 that went straight into the ground (nose first), was blamed on partial windshear and pilot error, though the wind shear was considered the minor issue. But, it was the crash that lead to the FAA to quietly start checking the 737's tail mechanism. All in all, do not fully trust safety agency's of the current generations. The ones from the 60-70's are gone. The feds now put pressure on ALL safety agencies to not blame companies or even nations.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
You may have a better chance of surviving an accident if you're sitting in the back... but I bet turbulence is more bearable in the front! Back when I was riding the school bus, we would all sit in the back because it was more bumpy (and fun). So I'm going to assume that airplanes are exactly the same, and are less bumpy in the front.
What is it's not my time? The guy sitting next to me, what if it's his time, and I'm just caught in the crossfire? What then, mysticism-boy?
I'm sure a 747 is much better at surviving German anti-aircraft guns. This brings to mind an old joke:
"British Airways Flight 27, this is Frankfurt airport, please taxi to gate 7."
(pause) "British Airways Flight 27, please taxi to gate 7."
"Stand by, I'm looking up the gate location now."
"British Airways Flight 27, have you never flown to Frankfurt before?"
"Yes, in 1944, but I didn't land."
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
Do you complain this much when people make anti-American remarks? Or are you a fat steaming pile of hypocrite?
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
I've figured out a way to save lives!
Make planes twice as big with twice as many seats, and just put everyone in the back half!
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
I've got some bad news for you, unless you are a bacterium. It is WHEN you die, not IF.
"uhmm arguably you are in control of the vehicle you are driving... but the semi two miles behind you coming your way at 85 mph driver's late has been driving for 12+ hours and is on speed ( don't buy this scenario years ago my friend was run over from behind on the freeway in just such a situation fortunately for him the cab of the truck stop climbing over his rear end when it smushed the rear passenger seats...), or the road rage maniac with a forty-five coming up behind you at 100mph+ (who'll get there first stay tuned!) oh yes then there the black ice on the overpass not to mention the van of illegal alien smugglers driving along on the wrong side of the road at 70mph+..."
I'll take Bigoted Clichés for Four Hundred, Alex.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
You may recall the early 1960's in the US when the back of the bus was a stigmatized area. Blacks in back, whites rode up front.
... etc." It's simple logic. If everyone tries to find a seat at the front of the bus, the driver will have to wait longer to close the door and move on to the next stop.
Blah blah blah... I seriously doubt the submitter was thinking of Ms. Parks when he made the comment... You ever heard the song called, "The wheels on the bus"? "The driver on the bus says, 'Move on back, Move on back, Move on back'
It's understandable that most Americans under a certain age have little to no experience with public transportation. Sad. Maybe if gas prices keep going toward sanity, this situation will change.
No, I'm not a european socialist commie... I am just an american who's had the pleasure of living in the denser parts of new england, so I have an appreciation for good public transit.
A host is a host from coast to coast...
Unless it's down, or slow, or fails to POST!
That was Boeing saying to play it down. Happens all the time. FAA/EASA are not suppose to be that way, though they are. Though, I had not heard of this one. Thanx.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
All of a sudden chivalry makes a comeback as men everywhere offer their mother-in-laws the more comfortable front seats of the plane.
I get the same feeling on planes... What causes that? Is the fuselage actually tilted?
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
They won't let me bring my parachute as a carry on, unfortunately.
I always wanted to read this safety pamphlet on the airplane.
I think they are wrong! The best chair is always 7!!!
The safest seat on an airplane is the ejection seat.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turritopsis_nutricula
"Turritopsis nutricula is a hydrozoan (jellyfish) with a life cycle in which it reverts back to the polyp stage after becoming sexually mature."
Does her shit stink as bad as the 300lb land-whale who went before her?
No sig today...
And you probably wonder why no one gives you any respect...
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
400 canopies + passengers weighing twice as much + the huge per seat cost = no way.
And in a helicopter it gets a bit tricky too. Not sure there IS a safe place in a heli that's going down other than not being in it in the first place. Anything affecting the rotor and you're history, I think (I'm no expert, but it appears to me that losing the rotor is about the same as losing the wings off a plane - at that point gravity wins).
Insert
Euh .. train crashes still happen; but .. the back of the train will probably be safest with frontal crashes and crashes won't be so fatal because you don't have to worry so much about the gravity...
Enjoy your train ride!
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
The pilot can dance a jig on the rudder pedals and the damn rudder should not fall off!
Here's to hoping you never get a pilots license. Flying a plane is not like diving a car, or using your computer. The have operation limits for reasons. They aren't built to be idiot proof -- that would be too expensive, then idiots like you would complain about the prices. And the idiot could still fly it into the ground, anyway.
To think that one of the major companies is worse than another to the point where it makes a real difference to you, is simply unfounded.
Yup, because there's no activity that is bad for you that people still partake in, bar smoking. Drinking, why that's just a big bottle of multivitamin!
Sometimes the food doesn't make it all the way to the back. Last time I fleww Iberia I was seated in the back and when they got to our seat there was n food left. They apologized, promised that perhaps we can get some leftovers from the first class but we have to wait till they finished their meal. Actually the first class leftovers were quite good (or whatever they were - some kind of special meals...)
...
But then, perhaps not getting the airline meal is good
I believe the more accurate statement is that the bodies at the back are easier to identify.
You will have wasted the flight insurance premium if you can't prove you died in the crash.
I once had the curious experience of sitting next to a failure analyst on a plane. he had some rather interesting animations on his laptop which were a curious thing to watch while flying.
on contract with the military, his company had run simulations of what happened to a cargo plane when it hit a wall. here is the basic set of steps of what happens when a plane hits something head on.
1. nose hits wall, rest of plane keeps moving. everything forward of the wings is immediately flattened.
2. wing hits wall, plane stops
3. tail of plane crumples and tears off.
structurally there is very little in an airplane fuselage that prevents if from collapsing on impact. only the sudden spreading of that impact across the forward edge of the wings is enough to stop or slow the plane. more so on military cargo planes, as their wings (at least the ones in the tests he showed me,) are not as swept back as the average passenger plane.
conclusions,
1. if you are in front of the wing, you are a pancake.
2. if you are in the middle of the plane, around the wings, you will be eating that pancake.
3. if you are in the back, there is a chance you might survive...
however that is only impact damage, the fireball from the wings tends to swallow the rear of the plane.
-- it's ridiculous how many people misspell ridiculous... (damn, damn, damn...)
Awwww..... did they learn how to share in pre-school? How cute....
(Ugh... think about it people, that usage is a sickening New Age-ism)
I do enjoy the train very much. It's the only way to fly
What?
(emphasis mine)
Now if only Popular Mechanics' editors had pored over the article before publication...
</nazi type="spelling">
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?
But not for that little kid who keeps kicking the back of my seat.
Have gnu, will travel.
I'm surprised I didn't see "jump just before the plane smashes into the ground" mentioned.
.
Part of the controversy was that she didn't die right away and perhaps could have been saved by American-style emergency medicine in comparison to what they do with the ambulances in France where they regard the ambulance as already being in the ER where they can stabilize the patient. The American method is that for critical trauma cases, there is little to be done at the site, in the ambulance, or even in the ER and that the thing to do is to rush a person into surgery where such bleeding can be stopped.
The story I heard was that Diana had a laceration of a pulmonary artery, a similar injury as Ronald Reagan had when he had been shot. What President Reagan had was major life-threatening as is the laceration of any major artery, but initially he didn't realize he had been shot, and when he got to the hospital, he was conscious and didn't know what the big deal was all about, but his doctors rushed him into surgery because they figured out how badly he had been hurt. If Diana had a similar injury, there could have been the same deal as a lucid, conscious patient where they puttered around in one of those fancy ambulances where if she had gotten the express treatment as Reagan, she would have lived.
The death of Diana was not one of these single-point-failure situation but one of these cascades of bad events, if any one of which had been prevented, would have kept her alive. You had her high-profile lifestyle, combined with the mobbing by photographers, followed by the driver way over the legal limit, in conjunction with the body guard who wasn't clued into the state of the driver, in combination with the way excessive speed, with the lack of seat belt (the belted body guard was seriously hurt but lived) (is this a Jon Corzine effect where people being driven as passengers in limos and taxis almost feel it is an insult to the driver to buckle up? - I have only started searching for seatbelts in taxis after the Diana tragedy although I have buckled up in my own car for years), with the procedures of emergency medicine to remove the final chance at life.
Part of the tragedy of Diana was that she was not dead at the scene from an aortic laceration, she suffered a laceration of a smaller artery, but it was one last link in a deadly chain, the interrupting of any link could have saved her.
In 100 hours of general aviation flying, I don't think I ever got past the experience level of having to think through every action, much like my days of being a teen driver. If you have put 100,000 miles in a car, you are at least at 2000 hours experience level, and a 2000-hour pilot is a high-experience pilot.
So the average "non-professional" pilot is a beginner who is this short of "getting behind the airplane" (having one's attention saturated by the multiplicity and sequencing of tasks), but I doubt the average 2000-hour "non-professional" driver is ever distracted by the tasks required to simply operate the car.
That the fatality rate per hour in commercial jets is nearly the same as in your own car supports this. I mean we can argue that the jet captain is much more capable because 1) the captain is operating a much more complex set of controls, and 2) there are many more "minor" compared to fatal accidents in a car. But my argument is what kills you is not lack of skill in either normal or emergency situations but instead the complacency factor, the completely unexpected, the brain-fart where you rolled right through a stop sign or the brain-fart where you rolled on to an active runway without tower clearance.
There's a short monologue by Michael Flanders (of Flanders & Swann fame) about flying, including a short section on travelling to the airport. There's more chance of being in an accident involving a motor vehicle, they say, than one involving an aeroplane.
The airport bus drivers have been given instructions to keep the statistics favourable.
I'm a little underwhelmed by their report. The statistical variations are rather small considering the sample size, so it's very difficult to say anything conclusive. As they point out, the only accident in the last 5 years was in (my hometown of) Lexington, KY, so what happened in the 1970s doesn't necessarily reflect on what's happening now.
What would have been far more educational is a survey of all accidents they can find (Europe and Canada have organizations that publish data just like the NTSB) and then a statistic showing the likelihood of surviving any crash at all based on seating. Analyzing only those ones where someone survived is, or course interesting, but it doesn't give the full picture. In fact, it seems a little sensationalistic.
Still, someone did the start of a good journalistic job, pouring over all those NTSB reports. Having done that myself many times, I can completely sympathize with what they call "drudgery". I give a 3 out of 5 for the report.
www.eissq.com/BandP.html Ball and Plate System. Amuse your friends. Crush your enemies.
Some of the comments made me laugh so I want to share the funniest airline story I know.
Some airline executive opened a low-cost carrier in the rural Middle East. People got on the plane with goats and other animals. At first they refused to take the animals but the people started protesting and nobody was going to fly. They relented and allowed the animals on board.
During the flight, the Captain notices that one of the landing gear is having problems and won't go down. So they have to land on one and slide it in. The Captain makes the announcement and the airline executive is scared shitless. He's in the crash position while everybody around him seems unaffected.
The pilot lands the plane skillfully, putting all the weight on the one gear while slowing down and then the other side hits the ground and they spin out gently into the sand. The executive is joyful and he looks around. People start gathering their possessions and animals without batting an eye. They thought this was how planes normally landed!
(Forgot where I heard that.)
Yeah, this isn't a new idea. I have an old copy of Popular Mechanics somewhere showing passenger compartments, made as separate units, dropping out of the plane fuselage on parachutes. I doubt that this would work any better than trying to parachute the plane as one unit though.
I remember that one - the point is to separate the passengers from the dangerous bits. The fuel tanks go up like fireballs, and I imagine that shredded spinning jet blades aren't good for your health either.
In this scenario the pilots set the autopilot to do the best job it can not to crash into a congested area and hop into the passenger compartment. At that point, explosive bolts or something blow the cabin away from the fuselage and three or four giant parachutes slow the descent to the ground to a point where most everybody survives with minimal injury.
But that would cost money, and no airline has the vision to advertise this as a safety feature. Going after the 'worried about flying' market is apparently something no carrier thinks is significant. I can think of some pretty fun, "conventional aircraft vs. PeopleSafe(TM) aircraft" commercials, though they'd better switch over their whole fleet in a hurry.
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... you'd have seen a neat (really large) rig they made up with a passenger cabin that they dropped onto their parking lot and they had crash test dummies in various seats and positions fitted with G-shock sensors on various body parts.
The rear-facing attendant seat delivered the least lethal impact forces.
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Next time take a decongestant - works well for scuba diving under similar circumstances. Hey, in a plane you even have the luxury of the drowsy-inducing variety, which is a major plus.
:) and take plenty - I only popped one the first time and got a nice bloody 'pop' when the pressure changed. Nothing life threatening, but there were a few sharks nearby...
Stick to the non-drowsy kind for scuba diving
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"Move to the back of the Airbus."
;)
I find this sentence somewhat xenophobic and anti-european. Does this mean that an Airbus is more likely to crash than a Boeing ? Feh.
I don't care if you want to get upset about anti-EU sentiment, but do it appropriately.
They're talking about the safest place to be, not the most dangerous. So, by mentioning an Airbus over all other brands of planes (there's at least half a dozen around here) they're placing it in the highest safety echelon. At least that's how I read it when I read the story summary.
I guess they don't teach reading comprehension skills in all those socialist EU countries.
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...is the ejector seat.
I don't know where I heard it, but I was always told the safest place was near the wing.
Was that just a myth?