Technically it would be safer, you're right. However, polls have revealed that people feel more comfortable pointing forward, and the arrangement has been so institutionalized that airlines are loath to change it. From their point of view, because accidents are so infrequent, upsetting the apple cart isn't worth the trouble.
This gets back to a point made here. An airline turning its seats around would be a widely discussed story, and the company would have to cite safety as one of the reasons for doing it. Airlines will not use safety as a marketing tool unless they absolutely have to.
It's common to find rear-facing seats on military transports and some private craft. At the airlines, some first- and business-class seats also face backward, but this is merely to make better use of space. Angled seats, like those shown here, must be constructed and mounted with added side-load impact protection.
Q: As a frequent (and tall) traveler, I love sitting in the exit rows, but every time the flight attendant asks me to look over the exit instructions card, I think to myself, Yeah, right, how often has that come into play? So I'm asking you: How often does someone in the exit row have to act? It strikes me that most airline emergencies don't result in an escapable crash landing.
Actually they do. They may not be the ones that squeamish fliers tend to remember or have nightmares about, but statistically the majority of airline accidents are survivable and indeed have survivors. And the type of situation most likely to require an evacuation isn't a crash, per se, but a less-than-catastrophic (if still serious) incident like the runway overruns we saw in Chicago and Toronto last year.
That's not to overestimate danger. There are, after all, more than 20,000 commercial departures every day in the United States alone, and the number that face emergency evacuations (or worse) is obviously very tiny. But it does happen.
The preflight safety drills and exit-row briefing cards are generally useless, so weighted down with excess verbiage and legal-speak that you can barely understand the instructions -- not that anybody pays attention to begin with. But you owe it to yourself to discern 1) where the exits are located and 2) the basics of how to operate them. (And as we learned last month, doors cannot be opened during flight.)
Q: My family and I were invited to a wedding in Moscow. The only nonstop is on Aeroflot. I have always harbored a prejudice that flying Aeroflot was risky. Would you fly Aeroflot? And what of its ancient planes?
Aeroflot is a carrier whose reputation unfortunately and unfairly precedes it, stemming mostly from leftover Cold War misconceptions about its safety standards. Once upon a time, measured in raw crash totals, Aeroflot had a comparatively awful safety record. At least on the face of it. Several asterisks were required, not the least of which was that Aeroflot, in its heydays, was a truly gigantic entity -- roughly the size of all U.S. airlines put together -- and it engaged in all manner of far-flung operations to some pretty distant outposts (for instance, rural Siberia, Antarctica). I personally survived two rides on Aeroflot -- between Moscow, Leningrad and Helsinki -- in 1986.
During the 1990s it splintered into dozens of independent carriers, one of which -- still the largest, but nowhere near the heft of the original -- inherited the Aeroflot name and identity. Based in Moscow, the Aeroflot that exists today operates about 90 aircraft and transports around 7 million passengers annually. It has not had a serious accident in more than a decade.
As for those allegedly ancient planes, Aeroflot's fleet is younger than Northwest's, and is comparable in age with that of many other reputable airlines. With their Gothic, distinctly Cold War lines, mainstay Soviet models like the Tupolev Tu-154 (check out this gorgeous shot) might look old, and indeed they are economically obsolete designs, but the Tu-154 remained in production until 1996. Ilyushin was building the four-engine IL-62 and IL-86 until 1994. The average Aeroflot Tupolev is of similar vintage to that of most McDonnell Douglas MD-80s flown by American or Delta. Late-model Boeings and Airbuses, including the 777 and A320, have also joined the Aeroflot fleet.
Q: Your frustrations over myths about airline safety notwithstanding, what do you make of the newly released European Union airline blacklist?
Last summer, after a spate of unusual crashes (several of them covered by this column in detail), the E.U. began compiling its long and controversial airline blacklist, published in March. The list, scheduled for review every three months, bans more than 90 airlines outright and restricts the operations of three others.
One problem with the blacklist brings us back to a point I've made various times in the past -- the great folly of comparing airline safety records: When the difference between a "safe" airline and an "unsafe" one is determined by a small handful of incidents spread over thousands, or even millions, of departures, the distinctions aren't particularly meaningful. Virtually no carriers are outright hazards.
In any case, the majority of the banned operators are small cargo outfits, most of them based in West and Central Africa, that wouldn't be carrying passengers into Europe anyway (including 50 from Democratic Republic of the Congo alone, although my own data, from Airline Fleets International, puts the total number of airlines in that country at around 30, none of which were offering scheduled service to any E.U. destination). To give you some idea, the highest-profile names on the blacklist belong to North Korea's mysterious Air Koryo and Afghanistan's Ariana. The latter is a company with a storied history going back more than 50 years, but for obvious reasons lacks the resources to meet European standards.
GO-AROUNDS
Re: Sept. 11 conspiracy theories
I did battle for many years on aviation newsgroups with various TWA 800 conspiracy-mongers. Every knowledgeable poster was accused of being a shill, but what was even funnier was the competition among the various kooks to the point of where they also accused each other of being shills, whose aim was to be so ridiculous that people would ignore the "real" conspiracy theories. The FBI helped fuel the theories with its maddeningly inexplicable refusal to release certain evidence. But then, the TWA 800 investigation was a crime investigation laid over the top of a hampered NTSB investigation. The FBI handles criminal cases its own way. (The 9/11 investigations also are of a criminal nature.) TWA 800 continues to be its own little cottage industry, with suits and Freedom of Information Act requests. The Internet is wonderful, but it is a two-edged sword. Years ago, I pointed out that it used to be that every village had its idiot, but all he could do was sit in the village square and mutter to himself. With the Internet, all the village idiots now can converse, compare notes and build on each other's mutterings, making them ... global village idiots.
John Mazor, a 27-year communications veteran in the airline industry
The line "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof" originated not with Carl Sagan but with the late Marcello Truzzi, a sociology professor and founding member of "skeptics" organization CSICOP. Truzzi himself backed away from the line after he realized it was being used by people to dismiss just about all the evidence for extraordinary claims. It's an important, if minor, sociological point with regard to 9/11 theorists. Two things must be defined: How extraordinary is the proof, and just how extraordinary are the claims? Neither question is easily answered, unfortunately.
-- Jonathan
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About the writer
Patrick Smith is an airline pilot. His column is archived here and his previous articles for Salon can be found here.
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