* I won't call it a crash since the aircraft made it to an airport and to a runway. We had equipment failure in flight so there was plenty of time for the flight attendants to review our crash positions, confiscate shoes, move people around etc. Everybody survived and I think everybody survived the emergency slides intact. Very exciting to mid-20s me.
Crashes in commercial planes are so rare that any single one almost always makes the news, while turbulence is extremely common. Let’s be fair and say that a seatbelt is not going to make a whit of difference when colliding with the ground at 200 MPH, so a 2 or 5 point harness are essentially the same in that regard. But a belt is plenty to help with turbulence.
Will there be a few instances, such as yours, where the extra protection would have been good? Of course, but there’s also a trade-off of weight, cost, and public resistance to strapping in like a race car driver. The other mitigations seem to work well enough when there is a situation.
"Accidents on U.S. airlines have become increasingly rare except for one category of in-flight mishap that has remained stubbornly prevalent: turbulence that leads to serious injuries.
More than 65% of severe injuries — or 28 of 43 — logged by U.S. accident investigators from 2017 through 2020 on airliners resulted from planes encountering bumpy skies, triggered by atmospheric conditions that could be worsening due to climate change."
Sure, let's reduce injuries. But 7 serious injuries per year seems quite good already compared to injuries from other forms of transportation. I wonder how many people are injured on shuttle buses to airports that lack seat belts. I'd have to guess it's more than that.
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/turbulence-continues-t...
I would like it because I mostly sleep on the plane. Also I take a lot of transoceanic flights (or did pre covid) which seem to have more turbulence than transcontinental ones (perhaps less discretion for rerouting, especially ETOPS flights?).
I miss the back-facing seats which I always chose when I had the option, as they are much safer (except for the risk of flying debris).
I'd think they'd want to make sure your shoes were on, so that you could walk safely over whatever debris was produced.
Isnt it because their seats are facing the other way?
???
That does not change the fact that seat belts save lives, however: https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/occupant-protectio...
They fly us around in tin cans at 30,000 feet without killing that many folks per year. I'd love to get status of fatalities per motorcycle mile vs airline mile. Got to be remarkably different.
(airplanes are zero most years)
Data for motorcycles:
https://www.iii.org/fact-statistic/facts-statistics-motorcyc...
Eyeballing, it looks like motorcycles have roughly ~50x as many fatalities per mile as passenger autos.
The DC-10 for instance...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-10#Accide...
