In your face, First and Business Class! Survival rates for various parts of the passenger cabin, based on an analysis of all commercial jet crashes in the United States since 1971 where detailed seating charts were available.
Illustration by Gil Ahn, diagram courtesy of seatguru.com, image taken from Popular Mechanics. Click the picture to see the original article.
According to this Popular Mechanics article, where you sit on a plane matters, at least safety-wise. This is in contradiction to statements made by Boeing, an FAA spokesperson and airsafe.com. Passengers near the tail of a plane are about 40 percent more likely to survive a crash than those in the first few rows up front.
Keep in mind that plane crashes are made spectacular by news reporting, but in fact are quite rare. The article reminds us “There’s been only one fatal jet crash in the U.S. in the last five-plus years.” Contrast that with the number of auto accidents; in the year 2004, there were 6.3 million police-reported accidents in the U.S. alone. Of those accidents “less than one percent” were fatal, which means that some number less than 63,000. Remember, that’s 63,000 car fatalities in the U.S. in a year compared to 49 air fatalities over the past five.
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The article is a little disingenuous, because restricting the data set to the "fatalities + survivors" ensures that the crashes are solely low-speed, low-altitude crashes that occur exclusively in the takeoff/landing phase of flight. Fuselage fractures are not at all uncommon in these types of accidents, and when the fuselage separates, yes, the ass end that DOESN'T smack into something hard (or smacks into it at a lower velocity) is the end that is safer to be in. That's not exactly groundbreaking information.
What would make the study truly useful is knowing the ratio of low-speed, low-altitude fatal accidents compared to all fatal flight accidents. If it's a tiny subset of all fatal accidents, then there really is no point in making sure you sit in the back.
How many fatal jet crashes in the last "five-plus" years? I'd have to peg that at one-plus. It all depends on how big the plus is, no?
I'll have to throw out a few of these statistics to my random seat neighbors next time I fly.