MANILA, Philippines — An aviation expert has listed which seats on an airplane can be considered the safest and the most fatal in the event of an accident.
Doug Drury, professor and head of aviation at Australia's Central Queensland University, wrote in The Conversation about the statistically safest airplane seats.
Drury echoed a 2015 article by TIME that wrote about aircraft accidents since 1980 and stated that aisle seats in a plane's middle portion had the worst outcomes (44% fatality rate) while the innermost seats in the plane's rear have the highest survival rate (28%).
Other portions of the plane looked at were the remainder of rear (32%), the remainder of the middle portion (38%), and the whole of the plane's front portion (39%).
Drury explained that being by an exit row provides a fast exit in case of an emergency, although plane fuel is stored in the wings which minimize the safety of the middle portions.
"Being closer to the front means you’ll be impacted before those in the back," Drury continued. "As for why the middle seats are safer than the window or aisle seats, that is, as you might expect, because of the buffer provided by having people on either side."
Drury reiterates the safety of air travel, citing the United States National Safety Council’s data that the odds of dying in a plane are 1 in 205,552, and from 70 million flights in 2019, there were 287 individual deaths.
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