Don’t just wing it.
Travelers book airplane seats for various reasons — they need more legroom, a view from the window, or a fast exit after landing — but is there a seat that may keep you the safest within the unlikely event of a crash?
In response to aviation specialist Doug Drury, the dreaded middle seat is statistically the safest if the plane goes down.
“The center seats are safer than the window or aisle seats, that’s, as you would possibly expect, due to buffer provided by having people on either side,” the aviation professor at Central Queensland University said in the Conversation.
Running through the assorted seating options, Drury noted that sitting next to an exit row will make sure the fastest exit if there’s an emergency — so long as there’s no fire on that side.
But not all exit rows are created equal.
“Wings of a plane store fuel, so this disqualifies the center exit rows because the safest row option,” Drury added before landing on his selection. “At the identical time, being closer to the front means you’ll be impacted before those within the back, which leaves us with the last exit row.”
The safest seat may differ barely depending on the kind and size of airplane, Drury said, however the physics of flying remain the identical for all aircrafts.
“Generally, larger planes can have more structural material and due to this fact more strength to resist pressurization at altitude,” the aviation expert wrote. “This implies they might provide some additional protection in an emergency — but this, again, is extremely depending on the severity of the emergency.”
Some 229 people died last 12 months from 12 plane catastrophes worldwide, FlightGlobal reports. Last March, 123 passengers and nine crew members died when a China Eastern Airlines-operated Boeing 737-800 crashed.
But plane crashes aren’t quite common. In response to the US National Safety Council’s evaluation of census data, the chances of dying in a plane are about 1 in 205,552, in comparison with 1 in 102 in a automobile.
