Safety in the cheaper seats

By A.B.

IF YOU want to survive an aeroplane crash (and, frankly, who doesn't), you give yourself the best chance by sitting at the back. As part of a TV programme, a Boeing 727 was crashed on purpose into the Sonoran desert in Mexico in April, and thanks to a variety of crash-test dummies, sensors and cameras on board, various aspects of the impact have now been analysed. And you wouldn't have wanted to be in the expensive seats, as the Daily Telegraphexplains:

Experts concluded that none of the plane’s first-class passengers would have survived the crash, but 78 per cent of the other passengers would have, with the chance of survival increasing the closer they were sitting to the rear of the aircraft.

Furthermore, a dummy in the "brace" position and wearing a seat belt fared much better than one with seat belt but no brace position, which notionally suffered head injuries, and one with neither, which would not have survived. So there is a reason to study the safety cards in the seat pockets by your knees. To be useful, these results must be assumed to apply to aeroplane crashes in general, and not just those of old 727s into sand. But aircraft designers will no doubt be factoring the variables into their conclusions when studying the data. Of course the thankful rarity of such crashes means that these data are not going to affect the decision-making of the vast majority of ticket-buyers. (It won't persuade many AirAsia X customers, for example, to avoid the Quiet Zone.) If you want to see what the experiment looked like, watch this video:

UPDATE: The television programme looking at this crash will be shown on the Discovery Channel in the US on October 7th, on Channel 4 in Britain and on Pro Sieben in Germany.