What’s the Safest Seat on an Airplane?

Air travel has entered an especially fraught place in the public consciousness lately, mostly due to a recent spate of incidents in which Boeing planes have caught fire, lost a wheel during takeoff, or sprung a hole mid-flight. These high-profile mishaps have given flying a bad name and made countless passengers ponder which seats on a plane are safest and which are the most dangerous.

Despite all the recent consternation, it’s important to remember that airline travel is remarkably safe. Packing into a full commercial flight may not always be the most comfortable or relaxing experience, but compared to just about any other methods it is one of the least deadly means of transit ever created. Airplane crashes are so rare that getting worked up about which seat is the safest one to plop your butt into is likely going to cause you more mental anguish than it’s worth.

That’s the official line, anyway. The US Federal Aviation Administration is very careful to point out that there isn’t any one section of an airplane that is more or less safe than another. In an email to WIRED, FAA public affairs specialist Rick Breitenfeldt says, “The most important thing passengers can do for their safety on any flight is follow all crewmember instructions.”

While no part of the plane may generally be the safest, there is probably a best spot to be sitting when specific incidents happen. Of course, that’s always going to depend on variables you can’t control. Each airline emergency plays out differently, affecting different seats more than others each time. What may be the best seat in the event of an engine breaking may not be the best place to be when a door gets ripped off mid-flight.

Party in the Back

The prevailing wisdom has long been that the back of a plane is the safest spot to sit. Reporting from Popular Mechanics and Time magazine analyzed 35 years of crash data up to 2015 and found that statistically fewer people who were sitting in the back died in plane crashes. Trouble is, those findings come from somewhat incomplete data. The victims’ seat positions aren’t always included in crash reports, so the data cannot paint a full picture of which zones are safest.

Daniel