Passengers should sit in the safest seats on an airplane to survive a crash, experts say
Those sitting in the rear seats of an airplane might have a greater chance of surviving a plane crash, according to experts.
However, no single “magic safest seat” actually exists, an engineering professional asserted.
When assessing the probability of surviving a plane crash, investigators look at five things: 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, reported the Wall Street Journal.
A crash is considered “survivable” by the National Transportation Safety Board if the forces transmitted to passengers don’t exceed the limits of human tolerance and if the structure of the aircraft remains largely intact. A crash is nonsurvivable when G-forces are so great that the body can’t withstand it.
When Jeju Air Flight 2216 crash-landed at Muan International Airport in South Korea in December, the plane burst into a massive 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 very back of the plane, which was the only recognizable part of the aircraft left intact.
A few days before the Jeju Air Flight crash, an Azerbaijan Airlines flight crashed in Kazakhstan Wednesday, killing at least 38 of the 67 people on board.
All survivors were seated in the rear of the plane.
However, many factors come into play.
“There are a lot of reasons someone may survive in what appears to be a totally unsurvivable situation,” Barbara Dunn, president of the International Society of Air Safety Investigators, told the Journal.
“Depending on how the aircraft lands and where a passenger is seated has an impact. If you have your seat belt tightened, it limits the amount of flailing the body goes through. It also depends on whether a passenger is able to assume a brace position.”
If a plane crashes nose-first, passengers up front will get the most impact — but sitting in the back of the plane isn’t the only factor that determines whether one will survive a plane crash.
“A lot of people think it’s safer in the back than in the front,” Dunn said. “Not necessarily. How quick the fire takes over and how quick you can get to an exit, all those things matter as well.”
“When you hear survivable, you’d think people survived, and when you hear non-survivable, you’d think everybody dies,” Anthony T. Brickhouse, an expert in aerospace safety and a professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, told WSJ.
“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 collected by the Flight Safety Foundation, an international nonprofit that provides safety guidance, there have been only 17 other crashes in the past eight decades where a plane carrying 80 or more passengers had one or two survivors.
In January 2024, Japan Airlines evacuated hundreds of passengers before the frame of the aircraft collapsed in flames after a collision with another jet upon landing.
TRT World reported that 2024 saw a grim increase in fatal aircraft accidents for the global aviation industry — compared to 2023 which was considered the “safest year ever in aviation” with zero recorded fatalities in major passenger plane crashes.
The good news is that “the vast majority of aircraft accidents are survivable, and the majority of people in accidents survive,” Ed Galea, professor of fire safety engineering who has conducted landmark studies on plane crash evacuations, recently told CNN.
But “there is no magic safest seat,” he added.
“It depends on the nature of the accident you’re in. Sometimes it’s better at the front, sometimes at the back.”
