DDN – According to experts, those who sit in the back seats of an airliner may have a better chance of surviving a disaster.
However, an engineering professional claimed that no single “magic safest seat” exists. According to the Wall Street Journal, investigators consider five factors when determining the likelihood of survival in a plane crash: aircraft integrity, safety restraint effectiveness, gravitational forces (or G-forces) experienced by passengers and crew, the environment inside the aircraft, and post-crash factors such as fire or smoke.
The National Transportation Safety Board considers a crash “survivable” if the forces delivered to passengers do not exceed the limits of human tolerance and the aircraft’s structure is largely intact. When G-forces are so high that the body cannot endure them, the crash is fatal.
When Jeju Air Flight 2216 crashed into Muan International Airport in South Korea in December, it exploded into a tremendous fireball, killing all but two of the 181 passengers.
The survivors were two flight attendants, a 33-year-old man and a 25-year-old woman, who were sitting in the plane’s far back, the only recognizable component that remained intact.
A few days before the Jeju Air Flight accident, an Azerbaijan Airlines flight crashed in Kazakhstan on Wednesday, killing at least 38 of the 67 persons on board.
All of the survivors sat in the plane’s back. However, several elements are at play.
“There are a lot of reasons someone may survive in what appears to be an unsurvivable situation,” Barbara Dunn, president of the International Society of Air Safety Investigators told the Journal.
“The impact of how the airplane lands and where a passenger is sitting is significant. Tightening your seat belt reduces the amount of flapping the body experiences. It also relies on whether a passenger can hold a brace position.”
If a plane crashes nose-first, passengers in the front will take the greatest damage — but being in the back of the plane isn’t the only element that decides whether you’ll survive a plane disaster.
“A lot of people think it’s safer in the back than in the front,” Dunn recalled. “It is not necessary. How quickly the fire takes over and how quickly you can get to an exit are all important considerations.
“When you hear survivable, you’d think people survived, and when you hear non-survivable, you’d think everyone died,” Anthony T. Brickhouse, an expert in aerospace safety and professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, told the Wall Street Journal.
“We’ve had people survive what we would call nonsurvivable crashes, and we’ve also had people die in what we would call survivable crashes.”
According to data compiled by the Flight Safety Foundation, an international nonprofit that provides safety advice, just 17 such incidents involving a plane carrying 80 or more passengers have resulted in one or two survivors over the last eighty years.
In January 2024, Japan Airlines rescued hundreds of people before the aircraft’s frame exploded in flames after colliding with another flight during landing.
According to TRT World, the global aviation industry will experience a significant increase in fatal aircraft accidents in 2024, compared to 2023, which was deemed the “safest year ever in aviation” with zero documented fatalities in major passenger jet catastrophes.
The good news is that “the vast majority of aircraft accidents are survivable, and the majority of people in accidents survive,” Ed Galea, a fire safety engineering professor who has performed seminal studies on plane crash evacuations, recently told CNN.
However, “there is no magic safest seat,” he said.
“It depends on the type of your accident. Sometimes it’s preferable to be at the front, in the back.
Reference: Passengers should sit in the safest seats on an airplane to survive a crash, experts say
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