Suddenly, airline passengers around the world are wondering if there is something special about Seat 11A.
That’s where Viswash Kumar Ramesh, 38, the sole survivor of the Air India Boeing 787-8 that crashed after takeoff in Ahmedabad, India, on Thursday was sitting. Did the location of his seat help spare his life?
Probably not, aviation experts said. There’s nothing that makes that or any other seat safer than anywhere else on a plane, and they added, it’s usually not worth trying to game out safety when selecting where to sit for a flight.
“If you’re in a crash, all bets are off,” said Jeff Guzzetti, a former accident investigator for the Federal Aviation Administration and National Transportation Safety Board. “So pick whatever seat you want to make you feel comfortable.”
While conventional wisdom holds that the rear of an aircraft may be safer, that theory falsely assumes that the front of a plane will always make impact first in the event of a crash, Mr. Guzzetti said. “You just can’t predict crash dynamics.”
Airlines use different configurations for different aircraft. On that Air India flight, Seat 11A was in an exit row on the left side, according to a seat map on SeatGuru. Sitting near an exit may allow passengers to escape more quickly in some circumstances, but Mr. Ramesh told India’s state broadcaster that the right side of the aircraft was “crushed against a wall,” preventing anyone else who may have survived the initial impact from escaping through the exit on that side.
In an emergency like a fire, when “you’re still sitting on your landing gear and the airplane is pretty much upright and intact,” an exit row may offer the quickest path to safety, Mr. Guzzetti said. “But with regard to the crash dynamics of an accident like Air India, I think it’s just a matter of chance.”
Shawn Pruchnicki, a former accident investigator at the Air Line Pilots Association and an assistant professor of aviation safety at Ohio State University, chalked up Mr. Ramesh’s survival to “purely luck.”
“In these types of accidents people just don’t survive this close to the front, this close to fuel,” Dr. Pruchnicki said, referring to the fact that the fuel tanks on a Boeing 787 are mainly on the wings and in the fuselage between them.
The crash on Thursday was the latest in a string of recent aviation disasters around the globe, including a midair collision in Washington in January, and crashes in South Korea and Kazakhstan in December, that have raised fears among some travelers about the safety of flying. Aviation experts say flying remains safe and that crashes, though high-profile, remain very rare.
Christine Chung contributed reporting.
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