The chances of surviving a plane crash may be higher for those sitting in the rear seats of an aircraft, experts have revealed.
Over the past eight decades there have only been 18 fatal commercial flights carrying at least 80 passengers that left behind survivors in their wrecks.
But how did those scarce survivors live through the seemingly impossible?
‘There are a lot of reasons someone may survive in what appears to be a totally unsurvivable situation,’ Barbara Dunn, the president of the International Society of Air Safety Investigators, told the Wall Street Journal.
‘Depending on how the aircraft lands and where a passenger is seated has an impact,’ she continued. ‘If you have your seatbelt tightened, it limits the amount of flailing the body goes through. It also depends on whether the passenger is able to assume a brace position.’
The aviation industry faced seven alarming accidents across several countries in the final days of December 2024, AA.com reported.
On December 29, the world watched a Jeju Air Boeing 737-800 crash-land at Muan International Airport in South Korea – making it the country’s deadliest aviation disaster since 1997.
Flight 2216, which was carrying 181 passengers, crash-landed, skidded into an embankment beyond the runway and burst into flames – killing every person on board, except two.
Experts revealed that one of the factors that may help the chance of surviving a plane wreck is sitting in the less-than-desirable rear seats of the aircraft
On December 29 2024, the world watched a Jeju Air Boeing 737-800 crash-land at Muan International Airport in South Korea – making it the country’s deadliest aviation disaster since 1997
Two flight attendants, a 33-year-old man and a 25-year-old woman, were the only passengers that miraculously made it out of the wreck alive.
Both were sitting in the very back of the plane – the only recognizable part of the aircraft left intact following the disaster. They were just a few steps from where the jet’s tail tore apart.
The man suffered bone fractures centered around the left side of his body along with spinal injuries that are being treated with a brace to assist in limiting any neck movement.
The woman fractured her right ankle and other possible injuries on the right side of her body.
Despite their painful injuries, both are conscious and communicative – and thankfully alive – as they remain hospitalized in Seoul.
Just four days before, an Azerbaijan Airlines Embraer 190 was shot down by a Russian surface-to-air missile near Aktau in Kazakhstan while en route to Chechnya’s capital.
Over the past eight decades of commercial travel, there have only been 18 fatal flights carrying at least 80 passengers that left behind a sole survivor or two in its wreck
In December of 2024, an Azerbaijan Airlines Embraer 190 carrying 67 passengers and crew members was shot down by a Russian surface-to-air missile near Aktau in Kazakhstan while en route to Chechnya’s capital
Flight 8243, which was carrying 67 passengers and crew members, killed 38 people and left behind 29 survivors.
All 29 of the surviving travelers were seated in the rear of the plane.
But where you sit on a plane isn’t the only factor that comes into play for potential survival.
Although the back of the aircraft may be relatively safer, where the plane touches down is one of the biggest factors that tie in – passengers in the front of a nose-first crash bear the brunt of the force.
‘A lot of people think it’s safer in the back than in the front,’ Dunn added. ‘Not necessarily.’
‘How quick the fire takes over and how quick you can get to an exit, all those things matter as well.’
Investigators who have assessed the chances of making it out of a plane disaster alive focus on five main factors: integrity of the aircraft, effectiveness of safety restraints, G-forces experienced by passengers and crew, the environment inside the aircraft and post-crash factors such as fire or smoke, WSJ reported.
In January 2024, 367 passengers on a Japan Airlines flight spent 18 agonizing minutes in terror as a fire spread in the back of the plane and smoke saturated the cabin following a collision with another jet upon landing, WSJ reported.
While at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport, the travelers panicked as the plane’s door failed to open, the PA system failed to work and most of the evacuation chutes weren’t available.
Although the blaze was centralized to the rear of the plane, the fire thankfully didn’t spread into the rest of the aircraft’s interior until minutes later.
Those mere few minutes proved to be lifesaving, as the airline successfully evacuated everyone on board to safety before the frame of the Airbus A350 collapsed in flames.
‘When you here survivable, you’d think people survived, and when you hear non-survivable, you’d think everybody dies,’ Anthony T. Brickhouse, an expert in aerospace safety, told WSJ.
‘We’ve had people survive what we would call nonsurvivable crashes and we’ve also had people die in what we would call survivable crashes.’
A crash is deemed ‘survivable’ by the National Transportation Safety Board or NTSB if the forces transmitted to passengers don’t exceed the limits of human tolerance.
Additionally, if the structure of the plane surrounding those passengers remains intact following an accident, the crash is labeled as ‘survivable’.
Plane crashes are deemed ‘unsurvivable’ when the G-forces – the gravitational forces that keep humans grounded to Earth – are so powerful, the human body can’t withstand it.
A television grab from an Algerian station captured the remains of the Air Algeria passenger plane that crashed shortly after taking off from a town in the Sahara desert in March of 2003 – killing 102 people and leaving one sole survivor
Human beings are subjected to 1 G in their daily life, but factors such as a roller coaster or a rapidly accelerating vehicle can create a force two to three more times powerful.
Generally, a person will lose consciousness at 4 G’s or 5 G’s – although there have been some to have survived even greater forces, Lonnie G. Petersen, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics, told WSJ.
But overall, the effect depends solely on the number of G’s and the direction and fullness of the force.
If a plane reaches no more than 9 G’s in a forward motion, passengers have a reasonable chance at escaping with serious injury.
‘The occupants will most likely survive with bumps and bruises,’ Thomas Zeidlik, a aerospace physiology researcher, told WSJ.
‘Crumple zones, much like cars, are built into modern airplanes to help with this, as well as air bags, seat belts and other devices.’
The global aviation industry experienced a terrifyingly significant rise in fatal aircraft accidents in 2024 – a stark contrast from 2023 which recorded zero fatalities in major passenger plane crashes and was labeled as ‘the safest year ever in aviation’, TRT World reported.
The accidents officially made 2024 the deadliest year for commercial aviation since 2018, which experienced more than 500 fatalities – 189 of them being from the crash of a Boeing 737 MAX Lion Air aircraft in Indonesia.
A policeman is seen waking past the wreckage of the 2005 Sosoliso airlines passenger jet that crash-landed and killed 108 people and left behind two sole survivors
A TV grab from Euronews showed rescuers on the site where Sosoliso Airlines passenger jet burst into flames and killed more than 100 people – 65 of them being children
But Ed Galea, professor of fire safety engineering who has conducted landmark studies on plane crash evacuations, told CNN that ‘the vast majority of aircraft accidents are survivable and the majority of people in accidents survive’.
He noted that how in modern times, the seats inside the aircraft must be built to withstand an impact of up to 16 G, meaning that in most incidents, ‘it’s possible to survive the impact of a crash’.
According to a 2015 study by TIME Magazine, 35 years of collected data from the Federal Aviation Administration found that the rear seats in the aircraft had a fatality rate of 32 percent.
In comparison, the middle seats had a 29 percent fatality rate while seats in the front had a 38 percent fatality rate.
But Galea warned that ‘there is no magic safest seat’.
‘It depends on the nature of the accident you’re in,’ he said. ‘Sometimes it’s better at the front, sometimes at the back.
However, he noted how there’s a difference between the seat that has the best chance at surviving initial impact and the seat that allows you to get off the plane quickly.
In his opinion, passengers should be choosing the latter.
A three-year-old boy was the only survivor of the 2003 Sudan Airways plane crash that was destroyed in a ball of fire while attempting to land, ultimately killing 116 people in total
Instead of the difference between life and death being where you sit, Galea said that the real difference in most modern accidents is how fast passengers can evacuate – adding that the proximity to an exit row is more important than the area of the plane.
‘The key thing to understand is that in an aviation accident, every second counts – every second can make a difference between life and death,’ he said.
But to better understand survivability rates among passengers in serious accidents – which are defined as having a fire, at least one serious injury or fatality or a destroyed aircraft – the NTSB examined commercial flights from 1983 through 2017, WSJ reported.
Thirty-five crashes met that criteria.
Slightly more than half of the 3,823 passengers in the studied accidents survived with minor or no injuries with 6.3 percent of them having experienced serious injuries.
Twenty-seven percent of those travelers were killed on impact, 4.1 percent of them were killed from fire or smoke and around 10 percent of them died from other unknown causes.
One of the serious accidents that was examined was a McDonnel Douglas DC-9 aircraft that was carrying 155 passengers and crashed shortly after taking off in Detroit back in 1987.
The Northwest Airlines Flight 255 left more than a 3,000-foot crash path following the disaster.
The Afriqiyah Airways passenger plane exploded upon landing in May of 2010 – the only sole survivor being a nine-year-old Dutch boy
A four-year-old girl who was traveling with her parents and brother was the sole survivor of the wreck.
All of the traveler’s seats were detached and scattered across two highway overpasses, but the young girl was ultimately found in the wreckage beneath one of them.
The four-year-old child was assigned to seat 8F – a seat usually placed in the middle or the forward of the plane.
In the Northwest 255 accident report, the NTSB said the passengers and crew were killed due to blunt-force trauma, the plane’s disintegration during its final impact and the destruction of the cabin, WSJ reported.
But the report still concluded that it was nonsurvivable – except for a combination of fortunate, yet unclear factors that happened to spare the life of one preschooler.
‘Sometimes bad things happen, and it’s hard to explain,’ Brickhouse added.
‘I hate to use the term, but sometimes luck does come into play.’
Mexico Business News reported that as 2025 now progresses forward, experts are urging the aviation industry to continue adapting and improving its safety protocols.
