The survivors of recent crashes were sitting at the back of the plane. What does that tell us about airplane safety?
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Look at the photos of the two fatal air crashes of the last two weeks, and amid the horror and the anguish, one thought might come to mind for frequent flyers.
The old frequent-flyer adage is that sitting at the back of the plane is a safer place to be than at the front — and the wreckage of both Azerbaijan Airlines flight 8243 and Jeju Air flight 2216 seem to bear that out.
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The 29 survivors of the Azeri crash were all sitting at the back of the plane, which split into two, leaving the rear half largely intact. The sole survivors of the South Korean crash, meanwhile, were the two flight attendants in their jumpseats in the very tail of the plane.
So is that old adage — and the dark humor jokes about first and business class seats being good until there’s a problem with the plane — right after all?
In 2015, TIME Magazine reporters wrote that they had combed through the records of all US plane crashes with both fatalities and survivors from 1985 to 2000, and found in a meta-analysis that seats in the back third of the aircraft had a 32% fatality rate overall, compared with 38% in the front third and 39% in the middle third.
Even better, they found, were middle seats in that back third of the cabin, with a 28% fatality rate. The “worst” seats were aisles in the middle third of the aircraft, with a 44% fatality rate.
But does that still hold true in 2024?
According to aviation safety experts, it’s an old wives’ tale.
“There isn’t any data that shows a correlation of seating to survivability,” says Hassan Shahidi, president of the Flight Safety Foundation. “Every accident is different.”
“If we’re talking about a fatal crash, then there is almost no difference where one sits,” says Cheng-Lung Wu, associate professor at the School of Aviation of the University of New South Wales, Sydney.
Ed Galea, professor of fire safety engineering at London’s University of Greenwich, who has conducted landmark studies on plane crash evacuations, warns, “There is no magic safest seat.”
