The Safest Seat on an Airplane Is...

popularmechanics.com

15 points·j_camarena··7 comments

It's a survival rate chart, full article here: http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/aviation/safety/4... Based on 20 plane crashes in the United States.

It seems silly to be worried about this sort of thing given to low likelihood of a crash in the first place. Most measures of flight risk are in "flight hours", so it's hard to make a direct single-flight measure. But most of the sources I was able to find quickly ranged from about 1/1MM to 1/10MM, largely depending on the airlines and countries out of which they are operating. I'll use 1/5MM for my purposes (if anyone has a better idea, pipe in).

So, if one were to look at the survival rates in the chart as "per flight" versus "per crash", it would be.

First Class: 49% * (1/5MM) = .0000098%

Ahead of Wing: 56% * (1/5MM) = .0000112%

Over Wing: 56% * (1/5MM) = .0000112%

Rear: 69% * (1/5MM) = .0000138%

[edit: cleaned up for readability]

Um, thats a pretty low chance of survival. In my experience, its closer to 0.999991 or so?

Ha, thanks for the correction. Was too caught up in the numbers :p

Correction: as JoeAltmaier pointed out, I should have written something along the lines of "failure rate" or "hazard rate". Clearly a "survival rate" like that would make no sense.

>> First Class: 49% * (1/5MM) = .0000098%

>> Rear: 69% * (1/5MM) = .0000138%

Thanks for putting the per-flight risk numbers here, but these two numbers there still feel odd.

I'm not sure how informative this is... Percent of what?

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