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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."
you're by the bathrooms and you can watch any hottie walk back to her seat.
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
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.
..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.
I just went through the cross-country driving exercise last week. Seattle -> Baltimore driving an RV took 4 days of driving 12 hours per day, about 48 hours all told, the RV gets 7 MPG 2,800 miles so 400 gallons of gas at around $3/per, so $1,200 in gas alone (nevermind food, etc).
The return flight took 5 hours and cost me $149.00
After seeing so many whacko drivers on the road during the trip I have no doubt in my mind that the driving portion was vastly more dangerous than the return flight!
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
I've had pretty good experiences in the trains in the i-95 corridor. I think it's funny that the trains are much faster than planes with the congestion at airports. Nothing beats a Western US bus trip, it's not just a ride, it's an adventure. A modern bard could build a lifetime of tales from two regional bus trips.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
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.
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.)
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.
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 wonder if a better metric for determining safety would be number of operator (driver/pilot) hours per crash rather than miles traveled per life lost. Or maybe operator hours per life lost. So one would take the number of hours someone operated a vehicle and sum the total hours for the total number of individual vehicle operators. Divide that number by the number of fatalities or crashes involving a particular vehicle type. I would imagine this would show that despite the much higher bar set for operator competency (pilot license) for an aircraft that flying is not really much safer than driving. Mostly since so many more people spend so much more time behind the wheel of a car than those than at the stick of an aircraft. For lack of a better way of putting it, flying is probably a safer way to travel long distances, but only because it's a less common form of transportation than driving. Also, it's worth noting that you are MUCH more likely to survive a car crash than a plane crash. I don't know how that figures into the consideration. (yeah... that was a contradictory post if I ever wrote one)
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
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 flew once shortly after I had had a sinus congestion of some sort.
Do not do this.
The initial flight was unpleasant, with not only my ears, but even my sinuses popping. I'm talking about the ones near your nose. Fleeing those pop at 36000 is at once relieving and incredibly disturbing. Anyway, something must have gotten in on that flight, I suspect from one of the many other passengers who spent the flight snorting, snuffling and blowing their noses.
By the time of the return flight a week later I had spent seven days breathing almost completely through my mouth, almost suffocating at night. The mucus was bad. It had gone from the copious runny clear kind, to a much more viscous and putrid green and yellow gunk with the consistency of caramel. I couldn't smell anything, except for the slightly puss-like odor emanating from the center of my head.
This time, only one of the nose sinuses popped. The other one just kept discharging, which was a pity as I had half hoped the inside of my face would explode from the pressure differential, allowing me the blessed relief of death. Surrounded by another entourage of acute sinus outbreaks, I expected the worst. When I arrived, it was raining at the airport.
It took me about six months to fully recover. I finally became able to breath through my nose after about a month. My lungs stopped feeling weak after about three months. Two or three months after that, I was able to smell things again. It occurs to me now that I really should have seen a doctor about all that.
In conclusion, I'd wear a mask when flying, except it would set off all kinds of alarms. On the bright side, I know more about the human repository system than I ever expected to.
May the Maths Be with you!
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.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
I've got some bad news for you, unless you are a bacterium. It is WHEN you die, not IF.
All of a sudden chivalry makes a comeback as men everywhere offer their mother-in-laws the more comfortable front seats of the plane.
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."