The survivors of recent crashes were sitting at the back of the plane. What does that tell us about airplane safety?
By Julia Buckley, CNN
(CNN) — 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.
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.”
“It depends on the nature of the accident you’re in. Sometimes it’s better at the front, sometimes at the back.”
However Galea, and others, say that there’s a difference between the seat that has the best chance of surviving an initial impact, and one that allows you to get off the plane quickly. It’s the latter that we should be looking for, they say.
Most plane crashes are ‘survivable’
First, the good news. “The vast majority of aircraft accidents are survivable, and the majority of people in accidents survive,” says Galea. Since 1988, aircraft — and the seats inside them — must be built to withstand an impact of up to 16G, or g-force up to 16 times the force of gravity. That means, he says, that in most incidents, “it’s possible to survive the trauma of the impact of the crash.”
For instance, he classes the initial Jeju Air incident as survivable — an assumed bird strike, engine loss and belly landing on the runway, without functioning landing gear. “Had it not smashed into the concrete reinforced obstacle at the end of the runway, it’s quite possible the majority, if not everyone, could have survived,” he says.
The Azerbaijan Airlines crash, on the other hand, he classes as a non-survivable accident, and calls it a “miracle” that anyone made it out alive.
Most aircraft involved in accidents, however, are not — as suspicion is growing over the Azerbaijan crash — shot out of the sky.
And with modern planes built to withstand impacts and slow the spread of fire, Galea puts the chances of surviving a “survivable” accident at at least 90%.
Instead, he says, what makes the difference between life and death in most modern accidents is how fast passengers can evacuate.
Aircraft today must show that they can be evacuated in 90 seconds in order to gain certification. But a theoretical evacuation — practiced with volunteers at the manufacturers’ premises — is very different from the reality of a panicked public onboard a jet that has just crash-landed.
‘Every second counts’
Galea, an evacuation expert, has conducted research for the UK’s Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) looking at the most “survivable” seats on a plane. His landmark research, conducted over several years in the early 2000s, looked at how passengers and crew behaved during a post-crash evacuation, rather than looking at the crashes themselves. By compiling data from 1,917 passengers and 155 crew involved in 105 accidents from 1977 to 1999, his team created a database of human behavior around plane crashes.
His analysis of which exits passengers actually used “shattered many myths about aircraft evacuation,” he says. “Prior to my study, it was believed that passengers tend to use their boarding exit because it was the most familiar, and that passengers tend to go forward. My analysis of the data demonstrated that none of these myths were supported by the evidence.”
Instead, Galea’s research showed that passengers seated within five rows of any emergency exit, in any part of the plane, have the best chance of getting out alive.
What’s more, those in aisle seats have a greater chance of evacuating safely than those in middle, and then window seats — because they have fewer people to get past to get out.
“The key thing to understand is that in an aviation accident, every second counts — every second can make the difference between life and death,” he says, adding that proximity to an exit row is more important than the area of the plane.
Of course, not every exit is likely to be usable in an incident — when Japan Airlines flight 516 crashed into a coastguard plane at Tokyo Haneda last January, only three of eight evacuation slides were usable. And yet, because of the exemplary behavior of crew and passengers, who evacuated promptly, all 379 people on the Airbus A350 survived.
Galea — who is currently looking for UK volunteers for February evacuation trials — says it’s still better to pick one exit row to sit close to rather than spread your chances and sit in between two of them, however.
What happens if an exit row — or seats within five rows of it — are not available on your preferred flight? “I look for another flight,” he says. “I want to be as close to an exit as I can possibly be. If I’m nine, 10 seats away, I’m not happy.”
‘Chance favors the prepared mind’
So you’ve booked your flight and selected a seat within five rows of the exit. Now is the time to sit back, relax and rely on the pilots and crew, right?
Not according to Galea, who says there are things we can do onboard that give us the best chance of surviving an incident.
“Chance favors the prepared mind,” is his mantra. “If you’re aware of what you need to do to improve your chances, you’re going to increase your chances of surviving even more. Think about how you’d get out.”
He says it’s essential, even if you’re a frequent flyer, to listen to the preflight briefing from cabin crew, and understand — really understand — how your seatbelt works.
“Believe it or not, one thing people struggle with [in a crash] is releasing their seatbelt. You’re in a potentially life and death situation and your brain goes into autopilot,” he says. “Most people’s experiences of seatbelts are in cars, where you press a button instead of pulling a latch. A lot of the people we interviewed [who survived plane crashes] had difficulty initially releasing their seatbelts. That’s why it’s important to pay attention to the preflight briefing. All that advice is really valuable.”
He also recommends fully studying the evacuation cards in your seat pocket and, if you’re seated at an emergency exit, carefully look at how you’d open it.
“That [overwing] exit is quite heavy and will likely fall on top of you,” he says. “I interviewed one of the people onboard the ‘Miracle on the Hudson’ [2009 emergency water landing of US Airways flight 1549]. He was seated by an overwing exit and hadn’t paid attention. As the plane was going down, he got the placard out and studied it. He was an engineer so figured it out — but I think the average person if they hadn’t bothered to read it beforehand, wouldn’t.”
Keep your shoes on until you’ve reached cruising altitude — and put them back on as the plane starts final descent, he says. If you’re a family or traveling with other people, sit together, even if you have to pay — in an emergency, being apart will slow you down as people inevitably try to find each other.
And wherever you’re sitting, count the number of rows between you and the emergency exit — both in front and behind. That way if the cabin is full of smoke — “one of the main killers” in modern crashes, he says — you can still feel your way to the nearest exit, and have a backup if the closest one to you is blocked.
“People think you’re a nut,” he says of passengers who carefully watch the preflight briefing, and study the evacuation cards and exit doors before takeoff. “But chance favors the prepared mind. If you’re not prepared, it’s quite likely that things won’t go well.”
Leave everything — and that means everything — behind
Geoffrey Thomas knows a thing or two about aircraft safety, too. Now editor of aviation news website 42,000 Feet, he previously spent 12 years as the founder of AirlineRatings, the first website to rank airlines by safety.
Thomas says that the safest structural part of the plane is the wing box — where the wing structure meets the fuselage.
“Every crash is different but typically in structural failure [an aircraft] will break ahead and behind the wings,” he says, calling the wing box a “very, very strong piece of structure.” That’s the case for the Azerbaijan Airlines crash, which split just after the wings.
But although Thomas has long suggested sitting over the wing, he says that the passenger behavior of recent years has made him recalibrate. He now believes that “the best seats to have are as close to the exits as possible.” Ideally a wing — but not necessarily.
That’s because, as Galea says, most modern crashes are survivable.
“Most accidents or emergencies today are not about a total loss of the airplane — it’s something else, an engine fire, an undercarriage failure or a benign overrun,” says Thomas. The main danger after the initial impact is of a fire breaking out and smoke entering the cabin. And while modern composite materials that today’s fuselages are made of can slow the spread of a fire better than aluminum, they can’t slow it forever — meaning evacuation is key to survival.
And yet, passengers don’t seem to understand this — or don’t seem willing to understand.
“More and more we are seeing that passengers will not leave their bags behind, slowing the egress of the aircraft, and quite often we’ve seen where passengers have not got out because the egress of the plane is slowed up,” says Thomas.
In May 2019, Aeroflot flight 1492 crashed at Moscow Sheremetyevo, killing 41 out of 78 onboard in the resultant fire. Passengers were caught on camera evacuating with their hand luggage, even as the back half of the plane went up in flames.
“Aircraft are certified so that every passenger can get off with half the exits shut within 90 seconds, but at the moment the egress of some of these aircraft are five or six minutes, so it’s a very big issue,” he says.
“The other issue you have is that you get lots of videos on social media of the inside of cabins with flames outside and people yelling. People are taking videos instead of getting off the plane.”
He believes that filming an evacuation, or evacuating with carry-on bags, should be made a criminal offense. “You are endangering people’s lives,” he says in no uncertain terms.
He cites last year’s Japan Airlines crash as a “perfect example” of what is possible. The crew kept calm and evacuated passengers efficiently — and the passengers obeyed the crew. Not one person was seen taking their carry-on luggage with them — and everyone survived.
But he says it was an outlier in terms of incidents.
“That’s a cultural thing — if you’ve got a flight attendant screaming at you to leave your bags, that’s what [Japanese passengers] will do. In most other countries people think, ‘Who gives a stuff, I want my bags,’” he says.
Now, whenever Thomas flies, he’s in an exit row, and wearing a sportscoat for takeoff and landing, in which he has his passport and credit cards. “So if I have to get out, I can, and I will have everything I need with me,” he says.
“You never, ever know. So many people get on and say, ‘It’ll never happen to me,’ and the next thing they know they’re a statistic. I don’t chance Lady Luck. I’m conscious of the issues and of people’s behavior, and I take steps to ensure that in a situation I hope never happens, I’m in a position to get off and not get blocked by an idiot.”
Once the plane is on the ground, it’s in your hands
There are other steps you can take to fly safer.
Shahidi flags turbulence as “one thing passengers can do something about.” He says we should be keeping buckled up at all times. “I wear my belt all the time unless I go to the restroom, and I go there and back very quickly, regardless of what the captain may be saying,” he says. “Statistically, more than 80% of injuries [on aircraft] happen to passengers not wearing seatbelts.”
Wu says he never flies without travel insurance — so that if something happens, and he loses his belongings in an evacuation, he won’t be out of pocket.
And both Thomas and Galea stress that choosing your airline wisely is also key.
“One rule of thumb is that the really good airlines pay the really good salaries and people want to work for them — the worst pilots have to work for somebody else,” says Thomas, who only flies with the highest rated airlines. Do your research before booking your flight — not all countries have the same high safety standards, he advises, so you need an airline that goes above and beyond on safety, wherever it’s flying, not just one that meets minimum standards.
But crucially, remember that in a survivable crash, it’s down to the passengers to act in ways that allow as many as possible to survive.
“People are fatalistic, they think if they’re going to be in a crash that’s it — so they may as well not bother because everyone’s going to die,” says Galea. “But that’s exactly the opposite of what happens.
“Just remember, every second counts.”
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