Topics: Travel, Holiday, Plane Etiquette, Flight attendant, Advice, Summer
It's now coming to the end of June and I'm sure many of us are buzzing to pack our suitcases, dust off our passports and jet off to somewhere sunnier.
However, it seems a lot of people have flight anxiety and prefer to know all they can about planes before they take the plunge and soar the skies at 30,000 feet.
And there's one question holidaymakers all appear to have after seeing how airline seating actually works.
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Now, according to fact page @explainingtheuniverse on Instagram, a plane is usually split into four main sections.
At the front of the cabin is First Class followed by the middle two sections, Business and Premium Economy, before good old budget-friendly Economy at the rear behind the wings.
After seeing the seating diagram, many Instagram users had one question they were keen to have answered - where the safest place to sit during a flight actually is.
Well, the general long-held belief is that the back of a place is the safest spot to plonk yourself.
An aviation safety researcher at the University of North Dakota, Daniel Kwasi Adjekum, explained a little more about the fundamental physics all planes seemingly adhere to.
Now, while the very front of the plane is often the most desirable place to sit - given that that's where First Class is and you can get on and off a whole lot quicker from there - it is also the most likely part of the aircraft to take the full force from a nosedive.
Adjekum explains: "The front section, obviously, is comfortable because it's away from the engine and the noise.
However, the expert notes: "That's normally the first point of impact. And so it’s a high vulnerability area."
And if you're needing some cold-hard stats to back it up, Time magazine once analysed 35 years of crash data in a 2015 study and also found that the safest place to sit on a plane is in the back.
Well, while the back of a plane is most likely to separate from the rest of the craft in a crash, it's actually more likely to remain intact than the front and middle sections - both of which are connected to the engines.
"The rear section often will break off," Adjekum adds. "Lots of that kinetic energy goes with the front of the aircraft and leaves the back intact."
According to the study, those sitting in the back of a plane had a 32 percent fatality rate while the middle rear was 28 percent, the middle was 39 percent and the front was 38 percent.
Morbid, we know, but you asked!
