If Pre-Flight Announcements Were Truthful, Revisited

In my last entry, I posted a link to an Economist piece in which they presented a pre-flight announcement that would be made if airlines told the truth. Some readers have stated in the comments that the statements in the article are incorrect, so I did some looking around. Here’s what I found.

Water Landings

In the Economist article, the hypothetical flight attendant stated that “in the history of aviation the number of wide-bodied aircraft that have made successful landings on water is zero”. This is probably based on an article they published in December 2002 titled Help! There’s nobody in the cockpit! In the article, they quote Paul Jackson, editor of Jane’s All the World’s Aircraft, who asserts that a commercial airliner’s engines, which hang in “pods” beneath the wings, make such a landing almost impossible.

Wikipedia counters this assertion by listing a number of commerical airliners, at least one of which is a wide-body, which have had water landings and survivors.

Cell Phones on Planes

Here’s what was said in the pre-flight announcement:

Please switch off all mobile phones, since they can interfere with the aircraft’s navigation systems. At least, that’s what you’ve always been told. The real reason to switch them off is because they interfere with mobile networks on the ground, but somehow that doesn’t sound quite so good. On most flights a few mobile phones are left on by mistake, so if they were really dangerous we would not allow them on board at all, if you think about it. We will have to come clean about this next year, when we introduce in-flight calling across the Veritas fleet. At that point the prospect of taking a cut of the sky-high calling charges will miraculously cause our safety concerns about mobile phones to evaporate.

An anonymous commenter wrote:

The part about not using cell phones in the article isn’t quite right. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers did a study on real cross-country flights using a spectrum analyzer and found that the amount of power in critical bands was enough to potentially disrupt flight systems. It may be true that some airlines will eventually install base stations in aircraft, but in that case the power transmitted by the cell phones will be very low (the base station tells the mobiles how much power to use) and will not disrupt flight systems.

According to the FCC, the ban currently exists for both reasons: interference with ground networks and flight systems.

The FCC is currently looking into allowing cell phone use in-flight if the plane is equipped with a “pico cell”, a small specialized cellular base station installed onboard the aircraft. As the anonymous commenter says, having such a device as a go-between would reduce the radio power output of the cell phones (because they’d no longer be expending energy trying to reach ground-based cell antennas.)

Seats Facing Backwards on Military Transport Planes

In the hypothetical pre-flight announcement, the flight attendant also states that in military aircraft, seats are rear-facing because they are safer in the event of a crash. In the comments, Chris Taylor wrote:

On airlifters such as the C-130 and C-17, their integral seating arrangement is sideways (on sidewall and centerline seating), not facing the rear ramp. If they are flying in a troop airdrop configuration then the seating is stowed completely and the troops sit on the aircraft floor. When using seating pallets, those seats will be installed facing the front of the aircraft.

Very rarely do strategic or tactical airlifters fly with rear-facing seats these days.

Patrick Smith, author of Salon.com’s Ask the Pilot, states in a recent column that “It’s common to find rear-facing seats on military transports and some private craft.”

If any readers, particularly those who fly on military transport, want to chime in, please do!

Is Facing Backwards Safer?

That still leaves the question of whether backwards-facing seats on planes is safer. First let’s look to a form of transport where crashes are way more common: the automobile. One of the hidden upsides of lots of crashes is lots of crash data. The consensus based on this data is that backwards-facing seats are safer. Hence the design of safety seats for babies and very young children: they’re rear-facing.

(By the way, according to Ask the Pilot, although there was an Airbus A300 crash in November 2001 that got everyone scared about flying, there were only 34 airline fatalities between then and February 2005. During that time, about 1.5 billion other passengers — 8 orders of magnitude, or 100 million times more — flew and lived to tell the tale.)

This guy believes that rear-facing airline seats would save lives in the rare event of a crash and has been leading a largely fruitless campaign. Boeing 777 pilot Captain Lim of the site Ask Captain Lim writes:

Theoretically speaking, the safest seat is one that is facing to the back of the aircraft. Why is it so? A backward facing seat gives better protection to a passenger in the event of an impact because of the back cushioning effect on the body. However this is not proven in a major impact!

Ask the Pilot’s Patrick Smith concurs, and both he and Lim state that it’s passenger preference that keeps seats facing forward. I can understand that: my late Dad, a man with a medical degree, refused to make use of a Cathay Pacific sleeper berth, claiming he wanted to be sitting up “in case of a crash”. As the whole War on Terror has proven, when it comes to the perception of safety, emotion often clouds intellect.

There’s another reason why airlines are loath to make seats face backwards: marketing. The minute an airline does this, they’d have to explain why, and safety would be one of the reasons. The airline industry is not like the auto industry; they can’t market on safety. Once again, I quote Patrick Smith:

…there’s a risk factor that compels the airlines into a collective honesty. With casualties so rare, the statistical swing from a “safe” airline to a “dangerous” one hinges on select few events drawn from thousands, or even millions, of departures. Reputations can be lost through a single act of folly or stroke of lousy luck. Quite understandably, airlines have no desire to put their competitive eggs in such a precarious basket.