Are you always worried about the safety of flying? Don’t be fooled by “survivor bias”…

I think one of the important reasons why people generally believe that the accident rate of passenger planes is high is the media society we live in - if there is a passenger plane accident, especially a serious plane crash with casualties, the news media will definitely follow up and report it immediately. After all, modern large passenger planes can easily carry hundreds of passengers. Car accidents actually happen every day, but as far as single events are concerned, few car accidents will become events that the media considers "newsworthy", so the public has long felt that aircraft operations are always accident-prone.

This is actually a typical survivorship bias: the reason why you always see driving safety is precisely because the victims of serious car accidents have died; and the reason why you think airplanes are unsafe is because whenever there is a plane crash, the media reports it so that you can see it.

Sitting in a contraption made up of millions of parts, traveling through the Earth's airspace, where temperatures are often -40 degrees Celsius, there is not enough oxygen or atmospheric pressure to sustain life. A rather complex combination of controlled compression and high-speed spinning parts provides you with breathing oxygen (initially at 200 degrees Celsius) while also propelling you forward at hundreds of miles per hour to overcome the deadly pull of gravity at the Earth's core.

Meanwhile, some smiling people offer you drinks and pretzels. As you are tossed in the turbulence and watch the wingtips of the plane bob up and down with a bend of more than 23 feet, you may rethink your life choices...

© Make A Gif

Although it seems crazy, given all the factors of overcoming gravity and distance, this seems like a practical way to get around, but as most people think, other than taking an elevator - it's probably one of the safest ways to travel, even safer than walking.

Still, commercial aviation accidents happen. So, in this case, where is the safest place to be on a plane to reduce your chances of being killed or injured? And what other ways, if any, can you take to ensure that you don't die in a crash?

Well, stow your folding tables and seatbacks, buckle up, and let’s dig in. And take a look at a pretty crazy incident that happened in Mexico in 2012, when a pilot intentionally parachuted out of a Boeing 727 before it plummeted to the ground.

How Commercial Passenger Aviation Became Safe

First, ever since the first person ever to die in a plane crash (he was a passenger in a plane flown by the Wright brothers), people have been haunted by the issue of deaths from air travel, even though commercial air travel is extremely safe, as mentioned earlier. What people may not realize is that commercial aviation has become remarkably safe over the past 20 years.

For example, in 2022, there were more than 70 million commercial passenger airline flights, carrying nearly 5 billion passengers. How many of those passengers died? Only 174[1]. Moreover, if you live in Europe, China, the United States, Japan, Canada, Australia, Israel, or New Zealand, data[2] shows that your chance of dying on a commercial flight is about 30 times lower than in less developed regions, where there are more older aircraft and more lax regulations. But even in less developed regions, flights still have an amazing safety rating, with only about 1 death for every 1.2 million passengers[3].

© The New York Times

It’s important to point out that this latter worst-case scenario figure is a three-fold improvement over the global average in 1977 (when there was one death per 350,000 passengers), which is still quite safe compared to all other forms of transport.

As Arnold Barnett, a professor of statistics at MIT, noted in his 2020 study on aviation safety: “…even as flying becomes safer and further improvements become more difficult, the pace of improvement is not slowing down.”[4]

Various regulatory bodies around the world, such as the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in the United States, have been pushing hard to get fatalities from commercial aviation accidents to zero, even though half a century ago, this would have been nearly impossible. In fact, commercial airliners in the United States have actually achieved this in recent years over the country's airspace, with most sources claiming that there have been zero commercial aviation deaths since 2009. However, this is not entirely accurate, and if you really dig deep, it's actually 1 death. Just 1 since 2009. We'll get to that later.

This is all thanks to a fanatical commitment to safety that is unmatched by any other mode of transportation. If regulators in other fields adopted the same attitude and passion and were willing to invest enough money to solve the problem, the number of deaths around the world would be greatly reduced.

On December 27, 2023, a Boeing 777 passenger plane encountered strong crosswinds brought by Storm Gerrit at London Heathrow Airport and staggered during its landing. © New York Post

For example, in car accidents, simply requiring all car manufacturers to change the seating arrangement so that all seats except the driver's seat face rearward would instantly save thousands of lives and reduce injuries to millions. This is a trivial change compared to the FAA and other agencies requiring airliner manufacturers to squeeze in a few extra potentially life-saving requirements. But it seems that this will never happen because most people don't like the idea and everyone feels relatively safe driving a car - even though it actually has many dangers.

Of course, in the aviation world, given people’s fear of flying, most people are happy to see aviation regulators go to such lengths to pursue safety. And the happy drive to the airport, listening to music blaring, texting friends, and eating McDonald’s will not in any way lead to you becoming one of the 60,000 people who die of a heart attack every day. For reference, this is equivalent to about 400 commercial airliner crashes every day, killing everyone on board…

Let's put it this way: if you happen to be in a room with about 100 people, you can be reasonably confident that at least one person in the room will die in a car accident, but you'd need to be in a room with about 250,000 people to have a reasonable chance of one person dying in a commercial airline accident.

Of course, this comparison is not fair, since more people drive than fly every day. But even on a per-mile basis, commercial aviation still has the lowest fatality rate. For example, according to data from Ian Savage of Northwestern University[5], from 2000 to 2009, cars had about 7.28 deaths per billion miles traveled, ferries had 3.17, trains had 0.43, subways had 0.24, and buses were a shocking 0.11. Commercial airliners had the lowest fatality rate, 0.07, or more than 100 times less likely to die per billion miles traveled than cars.

Going back to the car data, there are 7.28 deaths per billion miles, which is by far the worst case scenario... however, motorcycle riders have 212.57 deaths, or about 3,000 times more likely to die per mile than airplane passengers.

In other words, for the average person, talking only about accidents and not deaths, you can expect to have 4.5 car accidents for every 1 million miles you drive in the U.S. (which is how many miles an American typically drives in a lifetime). But to have the same number of commercial aviation accidents in the U.S., you'd need to take about 500,000 flights.

To make this more comparable, consider this: if you drove 15,000 miles per year in the U.S. starting at age 16, you would have completed 1 million miles and had about 4.5 accidents by age 83. To achieve the same number of accidents on a commercial airplane, you would need to fly every day for 1,174 years.

Now, you might be thinking, "But most car accidents don't result in death, but don't most people die in airplane accidents?"

The answer is no, far from it. In fact, most people involved in a typical commercial aviation accident not only survive, but are generally not injured. The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) states that from 2001 to 2017, 98.2% of people survived commercial aviation accidents (suffering only minor or no injuries), 0.6% of those with serious injuries survived, and 1.3% died.[6]

© The Washington Post

The European Transport Safety Council (ETSC) states that the survival rate in Europe is around 90%[7]. The small difference here may be due to short-haul flights, where smaller commercial aircraft (under 60 passengers) tend to have a poorer safety record than larger commercial aircraft – although it is still quite good. There are more short-haul flights across Europe than in the United States, where many parts of the country are almost deserted and cities are very far apart. Or it may simply be that Europe and the United States have achieved such good safety ratings over the past few decades that even with millions of flights during that time, the data may still be significantly skewed by a few particularly serious accidents.

In the United States, from 2015 to 2020, there were 62 million car accidents, resulting in nearly 15 million injuries. In commercial passenger aviation, during the exact same time period, there were 176 accidents in the United States, resulting in only 111 injuries. As mentioned earlier, there has only been one fatal accident on U.S.-operated commercial airliners in the United States since 2009, which is a pretty extreme case. We’ll get into this bizarre story in more detail later.

According to the International Air Transport Association’s (IATA) 2022 flight accident fatality data[8], if you took a flight every day, it would take a full 25,214 years for you to have a 100% chance of dying in a commercial airliner accident. The association further noted that 2022 was not even a good year in this regard, as the data was skewed by a crash in China, which accounted for 132 of the 158 deaths counted that year.

The safest seat on an airplane

First, before I dive into the broader statistics, I want to talk about a crazy experiment: a group of scientists deliberately crashed a Boeing 727 filled with crash-test dummies, cameras, and sensors in order to study every aspect of passenger safety in a real-life scenario rather than the usual computer simulation.

Initially, they wanted to conduct the experiment in the U.S. The Federal Aviation Administration rejected the plan because the unmanned aircraft might still fly along its route, endangering the safety of people on the ground.

However, Mexican authorities said: We don't mind! and allowed the experiment to be carried out near the city of Mexicali on April 27, 2012. However, they required real pilots to be on board, rather than remotely controlling the aircraft as originally planned (mainly because the aircraft would pass through densely populated areas). The pilots obviously didn't want to die in vain, so they were given parachutes, and three minutes before the crash, the two pilots and an engineer abandoned the plane to escape. Since then, the plane has been remotely controlled and has become one of the coolest remote-controlled aircraft in history.

Television footage of the Boeing 727 trijet crashing in the desert during an experiment on April 27, 2012 shows the main landing gear and nose broken off. © Wikipedia

Data after the crash showed that those sitting near the front of the plane had the highest risk of injury or death. Those in the middle of the plane were also in the middle of the pack. Most people sitting in the back row were safe in the crash.

They also found that dummies that were posed for the impact test were less likely to suffer head and spinal injuries, but interestingly, were more likely to suffer leg fractures than those that were not posed for the impact test.

The crash on December 1, 1984, took more than four years of preparation by NASA Ames Research Center, Langley Research Center, Dryden Flight Research Center, the Federal Aviation Administration and General Electric. Afterwards, the Federal Aviation Administration concluded that about a quarter of the passengers would survive, that fuel additives did not sufficiently reduce the risk of fire, and that some changes to the equipment in the aircraft cabin would be needed. © This Day in Aviation

It’s worth noting that this wasn’t the only time this type of experiment was conducted. Another similar experiment was conducted jointly by NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration on December 1, 1984, when they deliberately crashed a Boeing 720 in the Mojave Desert. In this experiment, they tested the seat belt settings, cabin structural integrity, and the effectiveness of FM-9 fuel additive, which was designed to reduce the atomization of fuel in accidents to see if it would help with post-accident fires.

The aircraft was fully remote controlled throughout and was set to land at a 3.8-degree glide angle, which is relatively typical in real-life crashes, although the landing gear remained retracted. After the crash, the most important data collected was that about 25% of the passengers (more likely those in the back seats) would survive the crash, but given the amount of smoke, it was speculated that everyone would have died before being able to escape. As a result, the Federal Aviation Administration began efforts to reduce fires and smoke by increasing the use of flame-retardant materials. They also began requiring that cabin aisle lighting be mechanically fixed to the floor, rather than just adhered by adhesive.

Well, smoke is a major concern, and the back seats are the safest of them all. So in a wider sample, can we find more detailed information?

In 2007, a report in Popular Mechanics[9] looked at aviation accidents from 1971 to that time, in which some people died and some survived. As to why they chose this particular data set, what they actually wanted to know was, in a serious accident, where were the people most likely to survive? In this report, they found that the survival rate in first or business class was 49%. In the middle third of the plane, the survival rate was about 56%. And in the tail of the plane, the survival rate was about 69%… Not bad…

© Popular Mechanics

Notably, they found in their report that the highest death rates of all were actually in the middle rows of the plane. This could be because of the wings that were filled with fuel. Or it could just be some bias in targeting specific accidents - considering that they could only find 20 accidents that met the criteria over the entire 36-year period.

Another analysis was conducted by TIME magazine in 2015[10]. They looked at the last 30 years of commercial aviation accident data in the United States, again looking at accidents that included both survivors and fatalities. The data included a sample of 17 accidents. Like Popular Mechanics, they also found that the closer you are to the front of the plane, the greater the likelihood of death in such an accident. However, their data was not as contrasting as the Popular Mechanics report, with people in the front third of the plane having a 38% chance of death, the middle third having a 39% chance, and the back third having a 32% chance.

© TIME

Digging into some of the nuances of all this data, you'll find that the middle seat of any part of the plane is the safest, and, unsurprisingly, in keeping with the idea that the back of the plane is safest, the middle seat in the back row fared best, with a mortality rate of just 28%, compared to 44% for the aisle seat in the middle of the plane. As to why, we can only assume that those bodies that have eaten KFC all their lives act as a buffer between you and everything in the cabin, acting as a human air bag.

On the evening of March 27, 1977, two Boeing 747 passenger planes collided and exploded at high speed on the runway of Los Rodeos Airport (Aeropuerto Internacional de Los Rodeos, now "Tenerife North Airport") in the Canary Islands, an autonomous territory of Spain off the coast of North Africa, killing as many as 583 passengers and crew members on board. © Admiral Cloudberg

Simulation of the Tenerife air crash. © Admiral Cloudberg

However, there are exceptions to this rule: of the 61 survivors of the infamous Tenerife air disaster in 1977, for example, the vast majority of the 61 people who survived out of a total of 644 people were seated near the front.

But in general, according to statistics, the safest seat on an airplane is the middle seat in the back row. In addition to the airbag cushioning speculation mentioned above, there is usually an emergency exit at the back of the plane. According to a 2008 study conducted by the University of Greenwich[11], this may be one of the most important factors in surviving a plane crash. The study pointed out that the seats within 5 rows of the emergency exit are the safest places on the plane. Although as mentioned above, the emergency exit in the middle of the plane is not as safe as other exits. This may be because it is close to the wing, which contains fuel and potential aircraft debris due to explosion and combustion.

In fact, it was this aircraft debris that killed a man, the only person to die on a commercial jetliner in the U.S. in the past 15 years. While many sources claim that there have been zero fatalities on commercial airliners since 2009, that accident wasn't technically a crash, but we think it still qualifies.

NTSB personnel inspect the damaged engine after the Flight 1380 accident. © USA Today

In 2008, an engine lost control on Southwest Airlines Flight 1380, damaging the fuselage and wings with debris, which caused explosive decompression in the cabin. Eight of the 149 people on board were injured, and one eventually died from her injuries after being partially ejected from the plane but pulled back in by passengers and flight attendants.

Since then, it has been 15 years of passenger aircraft operations in the continental United States. One fatality. 15 years. Nearly 200 million flights.

Of course, the last few rows aren't all good. While you'll have a higher chance of surviving a crash and are less likely to have people around you because the back of the plane is usually the least crowded, on many planes the only non-emergency exits are at the front, so you'll have to wait longer to get off the plane. Plus, you'll be thrown around more in turbulence.

© GETTY IMAGES

Also, back to the safety question, for what it's worth, the air in the cabin is recirculated every few minutes, and usually the old air is exhausted from the back of the plane. So technically, those who sit at the front of the plane may be safer because the air generally flows backwards, and if someone at the front of the plane coughs with germs, the droplets will float to the back with the air, and you are sitting in the back row...

Anyway, we've already been too nitpicking about the possibility of dying in a plane crash, pandering to an extremely irrational fear of flying, so I thought it would be time to throw the germaphobes among us an irrational bone to chew on.

© Science | HowStuffWorks

In this regard, a 2018 Emory University study examined the spread of various infections on commercial flights[12]. They found that aisle seats had an average of 64 potential exposures, while middle seats had 58 and window seats had 12. As to why, they noted that by sitting by the window, you are as far away from the passengers and crew as possible, and every additional distance you have from other passengers greatly reduces the likelihood of contracting the virus from those people.

Something more deadly than the common cold, and more common when flying, is venous thromboembolism (VTE), also known as "Economy Class Syndrome." In this case, long periods of sitting can cause blood clots to form in your veins, which are accelerated by the ultra-dry air at high altitudes, which dehydrates you quickly (one of the reasons airlines sell you lots of drinks).

Although it is difficult to track how common VTE is due to flying because symptoms usually take a long time to develop, a 2018 study titled "Prevention of Venous Thromboembolism During Flight"[13] suggested that approximately 1 in 4,500 passengers will experience symptoms within 8 weeks of a long-haul flight, and that the increased risk factor for flying is approximately 2.8 times that of the general population.

© Pitch Aircraft Seating

As the name suggests, "economy class syndrome" seems to be much less likely to occur in those with more legroom and the ability to stand up and stretch (first and business class). It follows that if you sit by the window, you are twice as likely to suffer from a venous thromboembolism. This is generally thought to be because aisle passengers often have to stand up.

So in terms of all the pros and cons of seat position and all these factors related to flight safety, overall, if an incident does happen, it's better to be in the back. And if the plane is not full, the back is usually relatively empty, which allows you to enjoy all the benefits of a window seat, stretch out, and avoid awkward interpersonal contact.

How to survive a plane crash

There are a few other ways to survive an airplane accident besides sitting in the back of the plane, the first of which is to pay attention to the safety briefing that comes before every flight, which most people don't do.

During this briefing, they will point out some precautions, such as the protective posture you should adopt if the plane is likely to crash. This protective posture is to bury your head between your knees and put your hands on the back of your head to prevent being hit in the head by objects from behind. It is worth noting that it is usually recommended to put one hand on top of the other hand instead of crossing the fingers, so that at least one hand can be protected.

They will also indicate where the emergency exits are located. This, more than anything else, will increase your chances of surviving a plane crash, so it is something you should pay extra attention to. Not only should you note where the exits are, but take the time to count the row number of your nearest exit seat. This is because in an accident, the cabin could very well be filled with smoke, which can be very deadly and obscure.

© New York Post

So, in general, if you survive the initial crash, the best way to survive afterwards is to get out of the plane as quickly as possible before you inhale the toxic fumes. This means finding the nearest exit quickly when you may barely be able to see anything - so it's advisable to memorize the number of rows before and after your nearest exit so you can count them as you crawl.

Getting out of a plane quickly is so important that regulators like the Federal Aviation Administration require every plane to be fully evacuated within 90 seconds. But in real-world crashes, it's actually impossible to evacuate within that time frame in many cases.

© Black Miners Museum

Back to the safety briefing, it turns out that every one of these is important... including how to use the emergency oxygen mask. You must pull down (otherwise it won't work) and put it on yourself before putting it on the kids. This is because, at a typical cruising altitude of 35,000 feet (10.7 kilometers), you only have about 15-60 seconds to remain conscious. Once your mask is on, you can safely put it on the kids, even if they are unconscious.

Speaking of these masks, they aren't actually connected to any central oxygen tank or anything like that, instead, when you pull on the device, it triggers a spring mechanism that sets off a small explosive device. This triggers a mixture of lead styphnate and tetracene to generate the heat needed to create a chemical reaction that produces the oxygen that your mask uses. (This is why they tell you to pull the mask to get the oxygen flowing - you have to set off the explosive device for the whole system to work.)

That's right, the gas you breathe through the mask isn't pure oxygen. Instead, the plane is equipped with a number of small chemical oxygen generators, primarily a mixture of sodium chlorate, less than 5% barium peroxide, and less than 1% potassium perchlorate. When these chemicals are heated with lead styphnate and tetracene, a chemical reaction eventually produces some filtered, life-sustaining oxygen (so you might smell a faint burnt smell in the mask, don't worry).

In fact, if the plane does catch fire, the oxygen masks usually won't open automatically, so that the extra oxygen doesn't make the fire worse. In this case, you may pass out. But rest assured, if the plane is on fire, the captain will immediately implement specific operating procedures for the plane to land it on the ground as quickly as possible.

By Daven Hiskey

Translated by tim

Proofreading/tamiya2

This article is based on the Creative Commons License (BY-NC) and is published by tim on Leviathan

The article only reflects the author's views and does not necessarily represent the position of Leviathan