Which is the safest seat on a plane?

After nearly 200 people went down in flames in a Brazilian airliner, there's a renewed interest in the safest seat. And David Noland writing in Popular Mechanics has an answer.

It's simple: move to the back.

In the past, conventional wisdom often said one seat is as safe as the other.

"A look at real-world crash stats, however, 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," he said.

He said that was the conclusion of a magazine study that exhaustively 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," he wrote.

In 11 of the 20 crashes, he said, rear passengers clearly fared better. Only five accidents favored those sitting forward. Three were tossups, with no particular pattern of survival.

In seven of the 11 crashes favoring back-seaters, he wrote, their advantage was striking.

A handful of survivors in two crashes 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.

"So when the 'experts' tell you it doesn't matter where you sit, have a chuckle and head for the back of the plane. And once your seatbelt is firmly fastened, relax. There hasn't been a single U.S. commercial jet passenger fatality front cabin or rear in more than four years," he wrote.

20 July 2007