In my last entry, I posted a link to an Economist piece in which they presented a pre-flight announcement that would be made if airlines told the truth. Some readers have stated in the comments that the statements in the article are incorrect, so I did some looking around. Here’s what I found.
In the Economist article, the hypothetical flight attendant stated that “in the history of aviation the number of wide-bodied aircraft that have made successful landings on water is zero”. This is probably based on an article they published in December 2002 titled Help! There’s nobody in the cockpit! In the article, they quote Paul Jackson, editor of Jane’s All the World’s Aircraft, who asserts that a commercial airliner’s engines, which hang in “pods” beneath the wings, make such a landing almost impossible.
Wikipedia counters this assertion by listing a number of commerical airliners, at least one of which is a wide-body, which have had water landings and survivors.
Here’s what was said in the pre-flight announcement:
Please switch off all mobile phones, since they can interfere with the aircraft’s navigation systems. At least, that’s what you’ve always been told. The real reason to switch them off is because they interfere with mobile networks on the ground, but somehow that doesn’t sound quite so good. On most flights a few mobile phones are left on by mistake, so if they were really dangerous we would not allow them on board at all, if you think about it. We will have to come clean about this next year, when we introduce in-flight calling across the Veritas fleet. At that point the prospect of taking a cut of the sky-high calling charges will miraculously cause our safety concerns about mobile phones to evaporate.
The part about not using cell phones in the article isn’t quite right. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers did a study on real cross-country flights using a spectrum analyzer and found that the amount of power in critical bands was enough to potentially disrupt flight systems. It may be true that some airlines will eventually install base stations in aircraft, but in that case the power transmitted by the cell phones will be very low (the base station tells the mobiles how much power to use) and will not disrupt flight systems.
According to the FCC, the ban currently exists for both reasons: interference with ground networks and flight systems.
The FCC is currently looking into allowing cell phone use in-flight if the plane is equipped with a “pico cell”, a small specialized cellular base station installed onboard the aircraft. As the anonymous commenter says, having such a device as a go-between would reduce the radio power output of the cell phones (because they’d no longer be expending energy trying to reach ground-based cell antennas.)
In the hypothetical pre-flight announcement, the flight attendant also states that in military aircraft, seats are rear-facing because they are safer in the event of a crash. In the comments, Chris Taylor wrote:
On airlifters such as the C-130 and C-17, their integral seating arrangement is sideways (on sidewall and centerline seating), not facing the rear ramp. If they are flying in a troop airdrop configuration then the seating is stowed completely and the troops sit on the aircraft floor. When using seating pallets, those seats will be installed facing the front of the aircraft.
Very rarely do strategic or tactical airlifters fly with rear-facing seats these days.
Patrick Smith, author of Salon.com’s Ask the Pilot, states in a recent column that “It’s common to find rear-facing seats on military transports and some private craft.”
If any readers, particularly those who fly on military transport, want to chime in, please do!
That still leaves the question of whether backwards-facing seats on planes is safer. First let’s look to a form of transport where crashes are way more common: the automobile. One of the hidden upsides of lots of crashes is lots of crash data. The consensus based on this data is that backwards-facing seats are safer. Hence the design of safety seats for babies and very young children: they’re rear-facing.
(By the way, according to Ask the Pilot, although there was an Airbus A300 crash in November 2001 that got everyone scared about flying, there were only 34 airline fatalities between then and February 2005. During that time, about 1.5 billion other passengers — 8 orders of magnitude, or 100 million times more — flew and lived to tell the tale.)
This guy believes that rear-facing airline seats would save lives in the rare event of a crash and has been leading a largely fruitless campaign. Boeing 777 pilot Captain Lim of the site Ask Captain Lim writes:
Theoretically speaking, the safest seat is one that is facing to the back of the aircraft. Why is it so? A backward facing seat gives better protection to a passenger in the event of an impact because of the back cushioning effect on the body. However this is not proven in a major impact!
Ask the Pilot’s Patrick Smith concurs, and both he and Lim state that it’s passenger preference that keeps seats facing forward. I can understand that: my late Dad, a man with a medical degree, refused to make use of a Cathay Pacific sleeper berth, claiming he wanted to be sitting up “in case of a crash”. As the whole War on Terror has proven, when it comes to the perception of safety, emotion often clouds intellect.
There’s another reason why airlines are loath to make seats face backwards: marketing. The minute an airline does this, they’d have to explain why, and safety would be one of the reasons. The airline industry is not like the auto industry; they can’t market on safety. Once again, I quote Patrick Smith:
…there’s a risk factor that compels the airlines into a collective honesty. With casualties so rare, the statistical swing from a “safe” airline to a “dangerous” one hinges on select few events drawn from thousands, or even millions, of departures. Reputations can be lost through a single act of folly or stroke of lousy luck. Quite understandably, airlines have no desire to put their competitive eggs in such a precarious basket.
There’s a good chance you’ve seen this photo by now: Pictured seated from left to…
Here’s a collection of interesting memes, pictures, an cartoons floating around the internet that I…
Tap to see the source. This is yesterday’s daily New Yorker cartoon, created by Brendan…
C’mon, let it not be Asians this time. Last time was pretty bad. Here’s the…
Jon Stewart’s right, and we’ve been here before. Where we are now, I’ve been before…
View Comments
This link (http://www.geocities.com/air_mech_strike/c17paratroopseats.jpg) will show you the sidewall and centerline seating arrangement on a C-17. Your comments don't seem to link geocities links so that might not show up. These can be stowed and palletised seats can be installed instead. In fact here's a photo of the palletised seats installed for a run to Antarctica. You can find the palletised seating manufacturer's site and their produict information in the link provided in my original comment.
This photo shows the sidewall and centerline seating configuration on a C-130. It's not the best photo in the world but you can see the 25ID troops are clearly sitting sideways, not facing the rear of the aircraft.
There is a US Army Transportation school slideshow here. Slide 18 shows the C-17 sidewall and centerline seating arrangement. Slide 26 shows the C-5 upper deck troop seating area but I honestly can't tell you whether that is front or rear-facing. The older AMC birds like the C-141 Starlifter and C-5 Galaxy tended to have their palletised seating installed in a rear-facing configuration 20 or 30 years ago, but even they have stock sidewall and centerline seating configurations.
Ooops. The above comment is by me, I neglected to put in my contact info. Sorry.
I should clarify in the Antarctica photo that, for those of you who are not familiar with the C-17 interior layout, the seats are installed forward-facing as indicated by the presence of cargo pallets on the aft ramp (you usually want the nice solid 463L cargo pallets placed behind the soft, squishy people, in the event of an inflight emergency requiring the offload of excess weight). The front of the C-17 cargo compartment looks a lot different.
This doc from Fort Bragg's US Army Advanced Airborne School shows the C-17 palletised seating configuration as well (p. 3-4), again installed forward-facing.
With all due respect to Patrick Smith, he might be ATP-rated but it's clearly been a while since he's seen (if ever) the inside of a modern strat-lift or tac-lift bird.
I served in the French Air Force, in a transport base that flew C-130s, and while the seating in our planes may not be the only possible way, it was sidewall and centerline. And pretty damn uncomfortable...
I have seen civilian planes that had rear and front facing seats, 4 apiece, like, say, in trains. I think they were ATR 42 or 72.
I've flown in many military aircraft, never seen rear-facing seats.
I think the cell phone part is accurate, though. I've seen many, many people use cell phones while the plane is in motion. I would guess that every major flight flying today has at least one cell phone turned on - every single plane! Yet no crash, ever, has been attributed to cell phone interference. Cell phones operate at about one watt of output power - airport radar might be as much as 3000 watts, yet planes aren't falling out of the sky. If cell phones were truly any threat, planes would have crashed by now.
Do you really think all those highly-paid Boeing engineers didn't consider radio interference when they designed their planes?
Anon, the engineers do consider radio interference, but they consider it within the specs mandated by the FAA. The problem is that electronic stuff that is designed to go aboard airplanes has to operate within FAA-defined RF emission standards, whereas consumer electronics only have to adhere to less strict FCC RF emission standards.
The two agencies are looking at harmonising some of the RF emission regulations but that is still a few years down the road and there's already a ton of noncompliant devices out there.
I have never seen personal electronics screw with aircraft avionics so far, but there's no question that GSM phones can cause a lot of audible mess on unshielded systems.
Didn't Mythbusters take on the seating forward or backwards issue and it was safer to face forwards. I don't remember the specifics of it though...
The issue with rear-facing seats was that while the body is able to withstand more G-Force facing backwards, the items on a commercial airplane become projectiles which can then be flung forward in a crash, posing a greater risk than just the G-Force. In the forward-facing configuration, the seat acts as a natural barrier, protecting the passenger from flying detritus.
Additionally (not covered in the Mythbusters episode in question), rear facing seats pose another problem - increased motion sickness. Many people are susceptible to motion sickness if they are not facing the direction of travel - myself included. Rear-facing seats on civilian aircraft would most likely increase the occurrance of air sickness.