November 18, 2007
Where would Icarus sit?
This seating chart could hold the secret to surviving your next (unanticipated) landing. Click on image for larger version.
If you're inclined to strap yourself into a tissue-thin aluminum tube, seated cheek-by-jowl with fellow miserable prisoners vacationers and business travelers, hurtling through the air at hundreds of miles an hour, tempting the fates that physics, feckless technicians, foolishly fearless flightcrew, and psychotic Mohammodean terrorists aren't conspiring to dash you to pieces on the ground, a mere 35,000 feet below, then this bit of advice is for you.
Popular Mechanics analyzed years of data collected from investigations of airliner crashes, crunched the numbers, and discovered where the safest seats are -- provided the impact is even survivable.
A look at real-world crash stats ... 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.
And drudgework it was. For several weeks, we pored over reports filed by NTSB crash investigators, and studied seating charts that showed where each passenger sat and whether they lived or died. We then calculated the average fore-and-aft seating position of both survivors and fatalities for each crash.
We also compared survival rates in four sections of the aircraft. Both analytical approaches clearly pointed to the same conclusion: It's safer in the back.
In 11 of the 20 crashes, rear passengers clearly fared better. Only five accidents favored those sitting forward. Three were tossups, with no particular pattern of survival. In one case, seat positions could not be determined.
In seven of the 11 crashes favoring back-seaters, their advantage was striking. For example, in both the 1982 Air Florida accident in Washington, D.C., and the 1972 crash of an Eastern 727 at New York's Kennedy Airport, the handful of survivors were all sitting in the last few rows. And when a United DC-8 ran out of fuel near Portland, Ore., in 1978, all seven passengers who died were sitting in the first four rows.
Oddly, the five accidents that favored front-cabin passengers all occurred between 1988 and 1992. In the 1989 United DC-10 accident in Sioux City, Iowa, for example, the majority of the 175 survivors sat ahead of the wing.
There was just one crash in which passengers in the front had a pronounced survival advantage. The only two fatalities in a 1989 USAir runway accident at LaGuardia were both sitting in Row 21 in the 25-row Boeing 737-400.
Where detailed seating charts were available, we also calculated survival rates for various parts of the passenger cabin. Again, the trend was clear: The rear cabin (seats located behind the trailing edge of the wing) had the highest average survival rate at 69 percent. The overwing section had a 56 percent survival rate, as did the coach section ahead of the wing. First/business-class sections (or in all-coach planes, the front 15 percent) had an average survival rate of just 49 percent.
Of course, the survival rate for people seated on my couch is 100 percent.
Ahem.
If you'd like some background info., they've taken a look at the ten most influential disasters in aviation history, too.
Happy flying.
Posted by Mike Lief at November 18, 2007 05:53 PM
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