Fatal accidents in commercial aviation are rare, but when they do occur, they can be catastrophic with low chances of survival for passengers and crew. What is also extremely rare are two airplane disasters within the span of a week. Unfortunately, this was one of those rarest-of-rare weeks.
On December 25, 38 of 67 people on board died when Azerbaijan Airlines flight J2-8243 — from Baku to Gronzy in Russia’s Chechnya region — crash-landed near Aktau in Kazakhstan. The aircraft (an Embraer 190) was purportedly hit mistakenly by Russian air defence and was forced to divert from its intended flight path. Videos of the accident site show a few survivors crawling out of the rear of the aircraft, which was relatively less damaged. Investigation to conclusively determine the cause of the accident is underway.
Then on Sunday (December 29), a Jeju Air Boeing 737-800 aircraft operating a flight from Bangkok crashed during an emergency landing at Muan International Airport in South Korea. Of the 181 people on board, only two are reported to have survived the crash, which is now being seen as the worst aircraft disaster in the history of South Korea.
The plane was reportedly attempting a belly landing as its landing gear failed to deploy. During this emergency landing, the aircraft skidded off the runway and crashed head on into the airport’s peripheral wall. The two survivors were reportedly pulled out by emergency responders from the tail section of the ill-fated aircraft.
Even as investigations are on into the causes behind these accidents, it can be inferred that the two crashes were not similar on most counts. Be that as it may, there is one commonality — the bulk of the survivors were seated in the rear part of the aircraft.
Safer at the back, in the middle of planes?
Most flyers don’t like the idea of sitting in the last rows of a plane. And it is even worse if one is allocated a middle seat in the deep depths of the aircraft cabin, right? Perhaps not so much.
While air travel is statistically the safest form of transportation and survival in any crash depends on a plethora of factors, there are some limited studies that show that the back of a plane could be the safest spot to sit, if and when that one-in-a-million crash occurs.
The Time magazine, in a 2015 study, analysed 35 years of crash data up to that year and reported that statistically fewer people who were sitting in the back died in plane crashes. This study, which went through US aviation regulator Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) database tracking accidents with both fatalities and survivors, found 17 with seating charts that could be analysed. While the oldest accident was in 1985, the most recent was in 2000.
According to the study, seats in the back third of the aircraft had a 32 per cent fatality rate, compared with 39 per cent in the middle third, and 38 per cent in the front third. Looking at row position, the study found that the middle seats in the rear of the aircraft had the best outcomes (28 per cent fatality rate). The worst-faring seats were on the aisle in the middle third of the aircraft cabin (44 per cent fatality rate).
In April 2012, a team of television studios staged an airplane crash in Mexico, where a Boeing 727-200 fitted with crash test dummies and other scientific instruments was flown into the ground. The test result showed that passengers at the front of an aircraft would be the ones most at risk in a crash, while those seated closer to the airplane’s wings were reported as having suffered survivable injuries. The test dummies near the tail section were largely intact, so most passengers there would have likely walked away without serious injury.
Another study, done by American popular science magazine Popular Mechanics in 2007, also led to similar inferences. The study analysed the US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) data for all commercial aircraft crashes in the US since 1971 that had fatalities as well as survivors, and for which seating charts were available. It found that those seated behind the trailing edge of the aircraft wing had a survival rate of 69 per cent. It was 56 per cent for those in the middle section, and 49 per cent for the seats in the front of the plane.
Conditions apply
These statistical trends are very specific to the circumstances of the crash in question. In some crashes, such as when the tail hits the ground first, fatalities could be higher in the rear of the aircraft. In others, where the front or the middle of the aircraft bears the major brunt of the impact, those in the rear may have a better shot at surviving the accident.
It is worth noting that the Time magazine study found that in a number of crashes, survival was random — “those who perished were scattered irregularly between survivors”.
The FAA has consistently stated that there is not any one section of an airplane that is more or less safe than another and that the most important thing passengers can do for their safety on any flight is follow crewmember instructions.
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