Article: Surviving airliner crashes

Here's a Popular Science Article on the Safest Seat in a crash. I've heard the back seats are safest, but this article goes through a row by row probability based on crashes for the last 30 years or so.

Handy dandy colored seating chart included. "Sit here to maybe not die. Sit here for free booze and go out in style!"

J

I was watching Mythbusters the other morning (I like to start my day off with a chuckle), and they were doing a thing on airliner crashes. They got some official airliner seats, mounted them on a gizmo that would smash them into the ground at the FAA official ft per second speed. Put a bunch of dummies in the seats, one a super dummy, equipped with a declerations meter, etc. They "crashed" first class section seats, economy seats, and a rear facing flight attendant seat, complete with its over the shoulder harness, etc. What they found was lotsa broken bones, but few fatals. Best place to sit? In the flight attendants seat. Fat chance of that. And luckily there was no fire involved in their tests, or post impact rolls, flips, etc.

Another day they tested the myth of a "large" woman getting stuck on a toilet seat for the entire flight, thanks to the vacuum toilet. What a hoot that test was...

Heh, looks like first-class equals first-to-die! I wonder what the pilots' seats percentages are.

The explosive decompression episode was quite awesome, as well!

A lot of their stuff in interesting, informative, and almost always entertaining...

Does anyone know what the latest statistics are for survivabilty in crashlandings by age and sex?

I did some readins on this in the 70s and the highest survival rate was male teenagers and early 20s males.

I wonder if it remains true today

Mythbusters wasn't taking into account internal injuries (blunt force trauma) which are likely the major killers, not broken bones. Plane crashes are notorious for causing aortic tears and other internal damage on impact.

True. I guess you can only simulate so much...

G-force cut-offs that are used in crash test evaluations do attempt to take soft tissue injuries into account, but you're right that they don't attempt to directly simulate soft tissue injuries. I don't believe that the official FAA tests do any better than what the Mythbusters did. Neither do auto crash tests done by NHTSA or the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. They all rely primarily on force and load measurements in evaluating survival probabilities.

"...They all rely primarily on force and load measurements in evaluating survival probabilities...:

Yup. In over thirty years of investigating auto crashes, I saw collisions where a vehicle sustained total (as in really really bad) damage, yet the occupants walked away with very minor injuries. And I saw minor damage collisions where someone in the vehicle died. Maybe the old "when your number is up..." theory is correct...