This is the best place to be sitting if your plane is about to crash

• • Plane crashes are extremely rare. The odds of dying in a plane are about 1 in 205,552.
  • If you want to feel safer, some seats that have a better track record during crashes than others. 
  • Data from past crashes and crash tests show that the back of the plane is probably the safest.

Plane crashes are exceptionally rare.

But as the recent crash of a Yeti Airlines plane in Nepal has shown, it is still possible for something to go wrong. 

A study of flight data this week showed the propellers on the engines of the ATR-72 turboprop were feathered before the plane crashed, killing all 72 people onboard. 

In the rare case that a plane goes down, some research indicates that the safest place to be sitting is in a middle seat near the back of a plane.

Don't like the middle seat? Think again 

"We rarely book a flight with hopes of getting one of the middle seats in the last row. Well, guess what? These seats are statistically the safest ones on an airplane," said Doug Drury, professor and head of aviation at CQUniversity Australia, in a blog post for The Conversation.

A 2015 analysis by Time magazine of the Federal Aviation Administration's aircraft accident database looked at 17 plane crashes with seat charts that could be analyzed.

These were the odds of these passengers dying in crashes, according to the  seating chart: 

• Back of the plane, middle seat: 28% – close to one in five.
• Back of the plane, aisle seat: 32% — about one in three.
• Middle of the plane, middle seat: 39% — about one in 2.5 passengers.
• Middle of the plane, aisle seat: 44% — just under one in two.
• Front of the plane: 38% — about one in 2.5 passengers.

Although some researchers have calculated that aisle seats may be safer than middle or window seats, the Time analysis found that at least in the middle of the plane, they were the least safe. And middle seats near the back appeared to be the safest.

"This logically makes sense too. Sitting next to an exit row will always provide you with the fastest exit in the case of an emergency, granted there's no fire on that side. But the wings of a plane store fuel, so this disqualifies the middle exit rows as the safest row option," Drury wrote.

"At the same time, being closer to the front means you'll be impacted before those in the back, which leaves us with the last exit row," he wrote. 

Here's the research in action 

In 2012, researchers decided to take an uncrewed Boeing 727, fill it with crash test dummies and cameras, and fly it into the Mexican Desert. 

The researchers directed the plane into the ground as if it were attempting an emergency landing. As it turned out, the front of the plane wasn't a good place to be.

The cockpit was torn away and some of the seats in the front flew hundreds of feet. The impact, whiplash, and destruction at the front of the plane could have seriously injured or killed passengers seated in that area — likely those in the first class and more desirable seats.

Dummy passengers at the back were still jostled around and in some cases likely to suffer head injuries, especially if they were not wearing seatbelts. But overall, they were much better off.

Not all crashes are created equal

"It's worth remembering accidents by their very nature do not conform to standards," Drury wrote. 

"In the 1989 United Flight 232 crash in Sioux City, Iowa, 184 of the 269 people onboard survived the accident. Most of the survivors were sitting behind first class, towards the front of the plane," he wrote. 

Chance of surviving a crash into a mountain or landing in the ocean nose-first, for instance, are much slimmer, he wrote 

But pilots know that and are trained to find the best place to crash or the best angle to land on water, Drury wrote. 

A notable example of this is when the 2009 US Airways Flight 1549, piloted by Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger and Jeffrey Skiles, lost power after flying into a flock of Canadian geese. 

The pilots were able to land the plane safely in the Hudson river, to the amazement of New Yorker passersby. 

All 150 passengers survived the crash unscathed. 

It's worth reiterating that flying is far safer than other forms of transport. People's lifetime odds of dying in a car crash are about 1 in 205,552, according to the US National Safety Council's analysis of census data. That's about 2,000 times less dangerous than a car, where the odds are 1 in 102.

"In 2019, there were just under 70 million flights globally, with only 287 fatalities," wrote Drury. 

But if you're feeling nervous, go ahead and reserve one of those back seats.

This article was originally published on April 18, 2018 and was updated to reflect the latest plane safety figures. Kevin Loria and Chris Weller contributed to a previous version of this story.