While the chances of being stuck in a plane crash are statistically far lower than you might expect, one airline has still gone to extra lengths to find out where the best place to sit would be.
Most people think of their own comfort when picking a seat on the plane, and airlines are clearly aware of that when they set the prices you have to pay for each individual row.
While nothing could be quite as bad as horrifying squished seating prototypes shown off by one airline, it's often better to avoid seats with minimal leg room — especially when you're heading on a long haul flight across the globe.
However, you might not have considered that some seats are actually safer than others when it comes to the rare but very real possibility of a crash, and one airline took it upon themselves to actually test this out in a wild experiment.
Advert
As reported by the Daily Mail, a 2012 experiment involving a 189-seater Boeing 727 flight was deliberately crashed in the desert by a team of scientists, as they aimed to conduct an test to see which place on the plane is the safest.
Advert
The plane came to a controlled crash in the middle of Mexico's Sonoran Desert, and video footage shows it almost gracefully floating towards the ground before the chaos happens.
Immediately upon the crash landing the front section of the plane buckles downward, causing a split that completely tears it off while the main body of the 727 remains in tact.
As you can imagine, while paying for first class seats gives you a luxurious experience when in the air, this experiment shows that it's probably the worst place to be in the event of a crash and the same is true for the cockpit and pilots.
Throughout the rest of the plane were dummies that were arranged into three different levels of safety. The first were positioned in a classic brace while wearing a seatbelt, the second lot were belted up but not in the brace position, whereas the unlucky third had neither a seat belt or a brace position to save them.
Advert
Experts analysing the effect of these crash dummies have evaluated that around 78% of the passengers outside of first class would have survived this crash, with the chances of survival actually increasing the further back you go.
"It's safer to sit at the back of the aircraft where the flight recorder is," explained Anne Evans, a former investigator at the Air Accidents Investigation Branch in the United Kingdom.
"The front is more vulnerable because that often sees higher impact forces. I would pick somewhere which is comfortable and within a few rows of an emergency exit," she suggests.
Advert
This experiment was only the second of its kind, following on from a similar deliberate Boeing 720 crash in 1984, and it ended up costing the team behind it a total of £1,100,000 ($1,478,445) to complete.