The Safe Seat
With all the excitement surrounding the miraculous landing of US Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River yesterday, I can’t help but be amazed by the skill of the pilot who carefully and masterfully brought down this passenger plane filled with 150 souls. It’s an amazing feat and a rare story of success.
When something like this happens, it makes me consider what I would have done had I been sitting on that plane. As a frequent traveler, I resign myself to the fact that there’s probably nothing I can do — it’s out of my control. Once I step onto a plane, it’s in God’s hands from that point forward. Yet there’s still the lingering question that goes through my head whenever I hear about a crash: is it possible to increase your odds of living through a disaster in the sky?
Most experts will tell you that where you sit doesn’t make a difference during a crash. They say all seats are the same:
“One seat is as safe as the other.”
-Boeing Web site“It’s an age-old question. There’s just no way to say.”
-Federal Aviation Administration spokesman
However, a painstaking study conducted by Popular Mechanics exposes the truth. After examining over 36 years’ worth of NTSB reports and seating charts from every commercial jet crash in the United States since 1971, they found that all seats are not created equal.
Real-world crash stats suggest that passengers seated 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. The researchers took it a step further and even 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. See chart below:
There’s no guarantee that you will live through a crash if you sit in the back, but judging from the majority of crashes over the past 30+ years, it looks like the odds of surviving are better in most cases. Unfortunately, this provides a dilemma for me. I hate sitting in the rear section of the plane — it’s noisy, crowded, and takes forever to disembark because you have to wait for all the slowpokes in front of you to get their luggage out of the overhead bin before they leave the plane.
It all comes down to a choice of safety versus comfort…hmm, I may have to rethink my seating plan in the future. But for now, I’ll just hope that Chesley B. Sullenberger III is piloting my plane and leave the rest in God’s capable hands.
