Safest Seat on a Plane, Or How to Survive a Crash 454
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."
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.
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:Easy answer... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:It's safer in the back and... (Score:3, Insightful)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/n
This is absurd to concern oneself with anyway since the death rate for commercial air travel is around 0.14 per billion miles. The death rate for automobile travel is 11,350% higher.
http://www.dallasfed.org/fed/annual/2001/ar01f.ht
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.
Re:What are the odds? (Score:2, Insightful)
That's only because the average human does a whole lot less traveling by plane than he does by car.
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:If there's one bit of mysticism I believe.. (Score:5, Insightful)
rj
Re:What are the odds? (Score:4, Insightful)
rj
The real answer is different (Score:1, Insightful)
http://www.karinya.com/dvt.htm [karinya.com]
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.
Re:What are the odds? (Score:4, Insightful)
PItch motions are usually pretty gentle in airliners. Roll motions can be more severe, especially in widebodies. Sit closer to the centerline. On a one-aisle plane, sit in an aisle seat; on a two-aisle plane, sit in the middle bank of seats (a center seat is best). That said, sitting close to the wing isn't a bad idea either.
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.
Re:What are the odds? (Score:1, Insightful)
The most common form of death on an airplane is fire/smoke inhalation, unless people are simply crushed of course. The G-forces in most crashes are far less than those experienced in a car crash, and easily survivable. Aircraft are large and compress slowly.
Re:If there's one bit of mysticism I believe.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Which is exactly the point of this article -- you DO have some control over survival!
Re:If there's one bit of mysticism I believe.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Now back to the actual point. The GP wrote "if your time has come". This outcome is not determinable in advance. If you die in a crash then your time has come. If you survive then your time has not come. This is kind of like Schrodinger's cat.
Re:It's safer in the back and... (Score:3, Insightful)
If I die, the fact that I've travelled a large distance in the process will hardly be much of a consolation.
Replacing deaths/mile by deaths/hour gives figures far less different.
Re:It's safer in the back and... (Score:5, Insightful)
Replacing deaths/mile by deaths/hour gives figures far less different.
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... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:The MythBusters say it is the (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What are the odds? (Score:4, Insightful)
For accidents that occur during landing or just after take-off, even ignoring the time factor, your altitude is far too low to safely bail out.
There could be some scenarios where parachutes would save lives, and the crew would be in a position to know that parachutes would be safer than trying to land, but I rather suspect these scenarios are going to be rare.
At some point you have to ask yourself if the odds of this solution saving lives justify the enormous costs of implementing it.
Re:What are the odds? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.