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Safest Seat on a Plane, Or How to Survive a Crash
Posted by
CowboyNeal
on Sat Jul 21, 2007 12:34 PM
from the law-of-averages dept.
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."
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It's safer in the back and... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:It's safer in the back and... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:It's safer in the back and... (Score:5, Funny)
During the crash you will be covered with turds and blue water before being incinerated with jet fuel. Which is about as dignified as the rest of air travel these days.
Re:It's safer in the back and... (Score:5, Funny)
If there's one bit of mysticism I believe.. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.. (Score:5, Insightful)
rj
Sit in the rear (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Sit in the rear (Score:5, Funny)
What are the odds? (Score:5, Insightful)
Therefore, a far more useful article would be "How to survive driving off a seaside cliff into the ocean."
Re:What are the odds? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What are the odds? (Score:5, Insightful)
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? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:What are the odds? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What are the odds? (Score:5, Interesting)
"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 ..."
Re:What are the odds? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:What are the odds? (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.
Reminds me of... (Score:5, Funny)
http://www.greenharbor.com/fffolder/carkeet.html [greenharbor.com]
Worry about something else (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
BBC already did this... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Not on Oceanic 815... (Score:5, Funny)
Excuse me... (Score:5, Informative)
So, they are working off of a sample size of twenty??? Not sure if I would draw too many conclusions from this dataset.
Best way to survice a crash... (Score:5, Funny)
Don't sit in the back! (Score:5, Funny)
I want to die like my grandfather... (Score:5, Funny)
not like the passengers in his car, screaming and yelling
Sitting in back is counterproductive (Score:5, Interesting)
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.)