Airline seat – sitting at the back or front……….which is safest?
After recent reports of several near-miss air crashes, some passengers are wondering………are you safer in the rear or the front of a plane?
Many believe that where they sit on the plane could be the difference between life and death.
One flier told “20/20” in the USA that “if there’s a chance to survive, I think you’ll survive in the back.”
Another flier said, “The back of anything would be better than being in the front because the people in the front get it first.”
But it is really true that some seats are safer than others?
“I’ve heard this myth so many times and there’s just nothing to support it,” Nora Marshall of the National Transportation Safety Board told ABC News and she has spent more than two decades investigating plane crashes.
She points to the 1989 United Airlines crash in Sioux City, Iowa, where fatalities were in the back and the front of the plane. When a Delta Air Lines jet crashed in Dallas in 1988 most of the fatalities were in the back.
“Every accident is so different that the circumstances of the accident are different,” Ms Marshall said. “There is no way to say which is the safest part of the airplane.”
Aviation analyst and ABC News consultant John Nance agrees the notion of a “safer” part of the plane is a myth.
“We’ve got as many people who’ve gotten out of a front section of a jetliner as they have gotten out of the rear section,” he said. “The best place, if there is a best place, would probably be next to the emergency exit, but even that isn’t proven out.”
Both Mr Nance and Ms Marshall advise not to worry about the safest place to sit because flying is so safe.
A Report by David Wilkening
John Alwyn-Jones
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