Ever since the first fatal plane crash on September 17, 1908, planes have continuously gotten safer. In 1933 the first commercial airline was made. In 1974, the first major plane crash killed 346 people in Ermenonville, France. In the 1970s, about 68 commercial planes crashed each year, killing 1,676 passengers in total. The most recent major commercial plane crash in 2009 killed a total of 229 passengers.
By analyzing information from airplane’s’ black boxes that are in fact orange boxes that record the functionality of a plane, as well as examining wreckage, investigators have been able to figure out what was wrong in the first place, and fix the planes so everyone after that is safer.
Flight can be considered one of the safest ways to travel. Because of improvements in plane safety, the chance of a passenger dying on a commercial airplane is just one in 4.7 million. You’re more likely to die from fireworks (1 in 340,733) or a shark attack (1 in 3,748,067). However, if you happen to board planes often, there are some interesting facts about planes and plane safety that you might not know.
Here’s what they do not tell you in the preflight briefing.
Commercial airlines go to great lengths to protect their passengers. Among obvious things like not allowing the pilots and copilots to drink before flying, most major airlines also do not allow the flight crew to eat the same food so as to avoid possible food poisoning from striking the entire flight crew. They are also not allowed to have non-essential electronic devices on them, a precaution to ensure that nothing messes with the signals needed to properly control the plane.
Sitting in the back of the plane raises your chances of survival to 69%, opposed to the front, where the chances are 49%. Even though the seats over the wing are thought by some to be the safest because the plane is more stable there and gets less turbulence, it has been proven that the back of the plane is the safest. In the documentary “The Plane Crash”, a test was done where a plane, a Boeing 727, was filled with sensors and dummies. They crashed it into the Sonoran Desert in Mexico and concluded that none of the first class seats would have survived, but 78% of all other passengers would have. A study by the magazine Popular Mechanics help a study in 2007 that took the information of all plane crashes since 1971. They found that survival rates for those sitting in the back if the plane was 69%, 56% for passengers over the wing, and 49% for passengers in the front of the plane.
The oxygen in the oxygen masks only last for about 12 to 20 minutes. This may seem like a short amount of time, but a pilot would need considerably less time than that to pull the plane to an altitude where the masses are no longer needed. Another thing about oxygen masks that you might not know is that airplanes use oxygen generators. When you tug the mask, chemicals are burned that produce oxygen as a gas. The extra chemical are filtered put when the gas goes through your mask. It keeps going until it’s all burned.