What was the last plane accident? The survivors of recent crashes were sitting at the back of the plane. What does that tell us about airplane safety?

Only two people survived the tragic crash of Jeju Air flight 2216 on December 29. They were both cabin crew seated in the tail of the plane. Chris Jung/NurPhoto/Getty Images

CNN — 

Look at the photos of the two fatal air crashes of the last two weeks, and amid the horror and the anguish, one thought might come to mind for frequent flyers.

The old frequent-flyer adage is that sitting at the back of the plane is a safer place to be than at the front — and the wreckage of both Azerbaijan Airlines flight 8243 and Jeju Air flight 2216 seem to bear that out.

 

The 29 survivors of the Azeri crash were all sitting at the back of the plane, which split into two, leaving the rear half largely intact. The sole survivors of the South Korean crash, meanwhile, were the two flight attendants in their jumpseats in the very tail of the plane.

So is that old adage — and the dark humor jokes about first and business class seats being good until there’s a problem with the plane — right after all?

In 2015, TIME Magazine reporters wrote that they had combed through the records of all US plane crashes with both fatalities and survivors from 1985 to 2000, and found in a meta-analysis that seats in the back third of the aircraft had a 32% fatality rate overall, compared with 38% in the front third and 39% in the middle third.

Even better, they found, were middle seats in that back third of the cabin, with a 28% fatality rate. The “worst” seats were aisles in the middle third of the aircraft, with a 44% fatality rate.

 

But does that still hold true in 2024?

According to aviation safety experts, it’s an old wives’ tale.

“There isn’t any data that shows a correlation of seating to survivability,” says Hassan Shahidi, president of the Flight Safety Foundation. “Every accident is different.”

“If we’re talking about a fatal crash, then there is almost no difference where one sits,” says Cheng-Lung Wu, associate professor at the School of Aviation of the University of New South Wales, Sydney.

Ed Galea, professor of fire safety engineering at London’s University of Greenwich, who has conducted landmark studies on plane crash evacuations, warns, “There is no magic safest seat.”

“It depends on the nature of the accident you’re in. Sometimes it’s better at the front, sometimes at the back.”

However Galea, and others, say that there’s a difference between the seat that has the best chance of surviving an initial impact, and one that allows you to get off the plane quickly. It’s the latter that we should be looking for, they say.

The 29 survivors of Azerbaijan Airlines flight 8243, which crashed on December 25, were all at the rear. 

Issa Tazhenbayev/AFP/Getty Images

 

First, the good news. “The vast majority of aircraft accidents are survivable, and the majority of people in accidents survive,” says Galea. Since 1988, aircraft — and the seats inside them — must be built to withstand an impact of up to 16G, or g-force up to 16 times the force of gravity. That means, he says, that in most incidents, “it’s possible to survive the trauma of the impact of the crash.”

For instance, he classes the initial Jeju Air incident as survivable — an assumed bird strike, engine loss and belly landing on the runway, without functioning landing gear. “Had it not smashed into the concrete reinforced obstacle at the end of the runway, it’s quite possible the majority, if not everyone, could have survived,” he says.

The Azerbaijan Airlines crash, on the other hand, he classes as a non-survivable accident, and calls it a “miracle” that anyone made it out alive.

Most aircraft involved in accidents, however, are not — as suspicion is growing over the Azerbaijan crash — shot out of the sky.

And with modern planes built to withstand impacts and slow the spread of fire, Galea puts the chances of surviving a “survivable” accident at at least 90%.

Instead, he says, what makes the difference between life and death in most modern accidents is how fast passengers can evacuate.

Aircraft today must show that they can be evacuated in 90 seconds in order to gain certification. But a theoretical evacuation — practiced with volunteers at the manufacturers’ premises — is very different from the reality of a panicked public onboard a jet that has just crash-landed.

‘Every second counts’

Sitting within five rows of an emergency exit improves your chances of surviving a "survivable" crash, says research. 

Aviation-images.com/Universal Images Group/Getty Images

Galea, an evacuation expert, has conducted research for the UK’s Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) looking at the most “survivable” seats on a plane. His landmark research, conducted over several years in the early 2000s, looked at how passengers and crew behaved during a post-crash evacuation, rather than looking at the crashes themselves. By compiling data from 1,917 passengers and 155 crew involved in 105 accidents from 1977 to 1999, his team created a database of human behavior around plane crashes.

His analysis of which exits passengers actually used “shattered many myths about aircraft evacuation,” he says. “Prior to my study, it was believed that passengers tend to use their boarding exit because it was the most familiar, and that passengers tend to go forward. My analysis of the data demonstrated that none of these myths were supported by the evidence.”

 

Instead, Galea’s research showed that passengers seated within five rows of any emergency exit, in any part of the plane, have the best chance of getting out alive.

What’s more, those in aisle seats have a greater chance of evacuating safely than those in middle, and then window seats — because they have fewer people to get past to get out.

“The key thing to understand is that in an aviation accident, every second counts — every second can make the difference between life and death,” he says, adding that proximity to an exit row is more important than the area of the plane.

Of course, not every exit is likely to be usable in an incident — when Japan Airlines flight 516 crashed into a coastguard plane at Tokyo Haneda last January, only three of eight evacuation slides were usable. And yet, because of the exemplary behavior of crew and passengers, who evacuated promptly, all 379 people on the Airbus A350 survived.

Galea — who is currently looking for UK volunteers for February evacuation trials — says it’s still better to pick one exit row to sit close to rather than spread your chances and sit in between two of them, however.

What happens if an exit row — or seats within five rows of it — are not available on your preferred flight? “I look for another flight,” he says. “I want to be as close to an exit as I can possibly be. If I’m nine, 10 seats away, I’m not happy.”

‘Chance favors the prepared mind’