During my last flights, I always got 3 points seatbelts. Surprisingly, my 4yo was not allowed to buckle it during landing and takeoff.
Business class? Haven't seen anything other than lap belts in economy.
How the airline industry got wise to seat belts
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Re: How the airline industry got wise to seat belts
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
And despite the complaints, US pax travel (scheduled) is INSANELY safe relative to most other forms of transport. 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.
Data for transport modes excluding motorcycles: https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics... (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.
It makes sense. Motorcycles are unforgiving in terms of safety features and attract disorganized and reckless people like flies to light.
Successful pilots are the opposite personality. They tend to be adventurous in terms of seeking experiences but are able to embrace following strict rules.
Re: How the airline industry got wise to seat belts
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hmm, after looking at that, and always being told that airlines are the safest. I was surprised they are only safest by that one metric (fatalities / distance) and not fatalities per trip or fatalities per hour.
I have personally never liked being blankly told that flying is safer than driving, because I’d like to understand how safe flying is versus driving when something goes wrong .
Two seconds of inattention in a car is a lot more likely to kill you than it is in a plane. It’s fairly constant risk - going off the shoulder is just a few dozen feet at most.
They also tend to be less well maintained, and the other participants less trained.
Re: How the airline industry got wise to seat belts
#34Re: How the airline industry got wise to seat belts
#35Having been once in a aircraft-damaging emergency landing* decades ago I am surprised lap only belts are still the norm. There's a reason the crew has four point restraints, and I'd like to have it too. * 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 sh…
Many business-class airline seats do now have three point seatbelts.
Re: How the airline industry got wise to seat belts
#36Having been once in a aircraft-damaging emergency landing* decades ago I am surprised lap only belts are still the norm. There's a reason the crew has four point restraints, and I'd like to have it too. * 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 sh…
They seem to have started adding shoulder belts in some of the newer fully-lie-flat business/first seats on some airlines.
Re: How the airline industry got wise to seat belts
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have personally never liked being blankly told that flying is safer than driving, because I’d like to understand how safe flying is versus driving when something goes wrong .
Two seconds of inattention in a car is a lot more likely to kill you than it is in a plane. It’s fairly constant risk - going off the shoulder is just a few dozen feet at most. They also tend to be less well maintained, and the other participants less trained.
That makes sense at first glance, but it's something I'm in control of. I was even thinking of this before, because the comparison is a little mismatched. I'm 100% likely to be a passenger when I'm in any plane, whereas I'm probably >98% likely to be a driver when I'm in a car.
I'm not sure why I was downvoted, because I'm just stating I'd like to understand (data/studies) instead of people's anecdotes and opinions, including my own.
My intuition is that car travel has a constant level of risk, whereas plane travel has a level of risk much below that when everything is good but (I'm guessing here) that risk goes much higher than the constant risk of car travel when something goes wrong (failure, human mistake, crash, birds, weather, etc.). I've searched for it before and didn't find anything, but it'd be nice to see any studies that confirm or deny this.
Re: How the airline industry got wise to seat belts
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
What was it about the emergency landing that made you surprised that lap only belts are still the norm? (Apologies if I'm asking about something blindingly obvious but I've not been in an aircraft-damaging emergency landing and I'm really interested to hear more about your experience.)
Probably what was briefly discussed in the article. So long as your seat stays anchored, a multipoint harness will keep you in position better. The injuries in the one accident were from people being moved side-to-side, not forward or up and down. The seatbelts didn't injure them, but the armrests did. A multipoint harness could (if worn properly) reduce those kinds of injuries. Of course, in a total failure where th…
At an airline training session I attended, a man who survived a famous passenger aircraft crash advised that one should get as low as possible in their seat and put their knees up against the back of the seat in front of you, while still buckled. The passengers that died around him were killed by the heavy luggage exploding out of the overheads and breaking their necks, so it's important to have your head below the seat back. The people who sat upright also tended to break their noses/faces on the seat backs in front of them. The speaker walked away from the crash with only a knee injury by bracing himself in the reclined position.
Re: How the airline industry got wise to seat belts
#39Re: How the airline industry got wise to seat belts
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hmm, after looking at that, and always being told that airlines are the safest. I was surprised they are only safest by that one metric (fatalities / distance) and not fatalities per trip or fatalities per hour.
I have personally never liked being blankly told that flying is safer than driving, because I’d like to understand how safe flying is versus driving when something goes wrong .
Things “go wrong” fairly “frequently” on airplanes but they are hardened for this with redundant systems and manual (as well as computer) overrides. You don’t hear about most of them but they are all logged and used for improvements.
The main difference is when a car has a catastrophic failure there’s a good chance the people involved survive.