If you follow avherald.com for any length of time, you’ll learn that 1) the vast majority of aviation incidents are completely benign, and 2) the vast majority of injuries aboard airliners are caused by passengers not wearing their seatbelts. The seatbelts aren’t there for the once-a-decade crash; they’re there for the once-a-month strong turbulence event, which the airplane itself will barely even notice.
I like the use of perspective in that last panel
Wasn’t this proven wrong on mythbusters too?
Yep - the seatbelt and the crash position are extremely effective at preventing death and lessening injuries
It straps you to the seat so when the plane suddenly drops 50 feet due to turbulence your dumbass doesn’t launch into the ceiling.
Yeah but the cartoon is funnier.
Yeah, it’s a similar reason your wear a helmet on a bicycle/motorcycle, if a car hits you doing 50+ MPH you’re probably done for regardless of whether you’re wearing a helmet. If you go over your handle bars face first into the pavement doing 10 MPH it keeps that injury from being catastrophic.
Amen. Both sides of my head would be just scar tissue if not for motorcycle helmets. And that’s just from sliding on the road, not hitting anything or being hit.
Have you tried not sliding on roads
Yes! It’s pretty nice! 20 years since my last crash and still riding. I guess I learned something.
Most of those were on the racetrack back when I used to do that sort of thing, though. Occupational (hobbypational?) hazard.
Yeah, and this is a much more frequent thing than crashes. I’ve been on planes multiple times when there was sudden turbulence and people without seatbelts lifted out of their seats. I don’t think any of my personal experiences resulted in someone hitting their head, but that happens. There was just video of one earlier this year.
Ive seen a loaded drink cart get a few inches of the floor, though that one was intense enough that even the flight attendants adopted an “oh fuck we’re about to die” face, which is comforting
Probably less of an “everyone is going to die” and more of a “everyone is going to start screaming and vomiting” look.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/21/world/singapore-airlines-turbulence-bangkok/index.html
This is the incident you are probably referring to.
Yep!
Exactly as you describe.
That scene in the pilot episode of Lost. That’s why.
I thought of this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kH6QJzmLYtw
Are you ready for the terries to get froggy?
Imma drax them sklounst !
I have observed that “very clever” people on the internet have a tendency to disregard solutions that are only partial, even if there is little to no downside to them.
“Oh yeah? Why should I be wearing a seatbelt in a car when it won’t even save me if we crash head-on into a semi truck at 100 kph?”
I skydive and people ask why a lot of us wear helmets since it’s not saving you if you hit the ground. The plane or other people can hurt you plenty.
It also means I can just flip my front visor down and not worry about stinking goggles.
Also a valid reason. I stick my audible altimeter in there too…so that as well.
Correct me if I’m wrong too, but if you’re coming in on a parachute and somehow hit your head during the landing, that could hurt a lot, right?
If you tumble then yes, it can help there too. It’s usually banging it on exit or turbulence or somebody coming in a little hot to a formation that I’m happy I have it. Pretty sure if you hit the rear wing even with a helmet that’s gonna cause you some issues though.
These days it might actually save you. Cars have gotten stupid safe in the last decade or so. I’ve seen a car smashed between two semis and the driver only had minor injuries (after they cut them out).
Crumpel zones ftw!
mmm crumpet zones
Not to be confused with crumple scones.
So you don’t get launched out the window and then crushed by your own car for the non-semi accidents.
So someone doesn’t have to scrape you off the road.
Not even partial in this case. I mean, the “turbulence sending you into the ceiling” event is fully resolved here.
Anyway, just here looking for the common sense pedantic clarification, found it, so now here just to say good job.
If you play the SNES version of Monopoly, you can play against CPU opponents. Mind you, this is artificial intelligence coded in 1992, on a cartridge with about 16mb of storage space for the entire game. Only a fraction of that is dedicated to the AI decision process.
If you propose a trade, I’ll give CPU $5 in exchange for $0, the CPU will respond with NO DEAL!!!
But if you propose "I’ll give you $100 in exchange for $0, the CPU replies “IT’S A DEAL!!!”
The CPU was holding out for a bigger handout!
Unrelated, but if you hold the B button, and don’t release, you’ll keep looping the shaking the dice animation. They use digital photo scans of a real hand/arm…if it were disembodied. And the animation looks like he’s just jacking off.
You weren’t kidding.
Edit: I see now you said SNES, can’t find a good animation of that one though. But I can see in the screenshots that it’s a pseudo-mocap human hand and yeah, that would be worse.
Old-school Monopoly jerkoff is how I discovered we can upload gifs now w/o using third-party hosters.
There’s something to that animation…
SNES is worse huh?:
Oh man I haven’t seen that classic in a while. Thanks for the smile!
Wow, talking about NES Monopoly on a post about airplane seatbelts.
I went down a bit of a rabbit hole on NES Monopoly because I used to play the game and wanted to see if I held the B button. Probably did, but I’m not sure.
Anyway, the world record speedrun of Monopoly takes advantage of the trade mechanics. Trade the CPU mortgaged properties for all of their money and they’ll lose the game because you have to pay a 10% fee on any properties traded that were mortgaged. And if you take all their money in the trade they don’t have any to pay the penalty.
Not NES. SNES.
I often see that in political arguments. There’s much to be said about wasting political capital on a poor and partial solution, but as you said, people bitch even if there’s no real downside.
Also in the event of a crash you don’t become a projectile that kills someone else.
Juat like in a car!
Or if you are on a Boeing plane and a side panel/door spontaneously flies off off you don’t get sucked out
/s, but not really /s
Most times. Almost all of the times.
Never been on a flight never assumed I would be afraid of flying however that sounds horrific, so thanks for giving me a new fear of flying.
Don’t worry, some turbulence is par for the course but dangerous turbulence is pretty rare. Also 50 feet is an exaggeration, turbulence usually feels worse than it is. Plane rides are usually smoother than driving in a car, but flying can make you sensitive to lateral motion.
Can’t really let random stuff like that with a low injury profile bother you. You’d end up fearing and respecting escalators in that case.
Reminds me of the time the brakes gave out on the L’enfant Plaza escalator for the DC Metro after the Rally to Restore Sanity (a lot good that did). Everyone was piled on going down and it just gave up the ghost and accelerated at full speed to bring them all down in a pile.
And when there’s a collision on ground. And when the pilot just breaks too hard after landing.
That factoid is from a decade or two ago, when clear air turbulence was a lot rarer. Nowadays, due to global warming, turbulence coming out of nowhere is more common, and on occasion results in unbelted passengers being thrown into the ceiling and severely injured.
Do you have a source for that? I’m skeptical.
Fair enough, seems to be a legitimate enough study.
I’ve also seen reports debunking this correlation. I don’t have a source but it may not be as cut and dry as this.
I mean, it is good to be empirical about things, but it would fit well into the other evidence we have.
The warmer air means there’s more energy kicking about in the atmosphere and, to my knowledge, we have pretty clear evidence that this causes more extrem weather events to occur. For example, hurricanes are more likely.
We’ll probably see those on the weather radar to avoid them, but at that point it would be weird to me, if the occurrence of lighter winds wasn’t also more likely in places we don’t avoid.I guess, a reduction of turbulence injuries might’ve taken place independently, because our instruments for predicting them are getting better, but then their frequency would’ve still increased.
There have been a few events in recent memory that made international news of passengers injured due to turbulence including someone who I believe died.
Crash survival statistics are actually quite surprising. Like, you have higher survivability odds in the back of the plane – cause everyone in front of you is your crumple zone.
About 20 years ago I read a grim book about plane crashes. They claimed that the number 1 predictor of crash survivability on commercial craft was being a male between the ages of 20 and 50. They’re apparently much better equipped to claw and climb over the other passengers on the way out.
Grim. I fly a lot and think about it at least every other trip.
Well, also that being bigger means you’re less vulnerable to smoke or toxic has inhalation, which is what kills most people.
Planes rarely reverse into mountains.
And the survival statistics have a lot to do with the amount of work that has been put into making the worst case “controlled descent into terrain” scenario exceptionally rare.
Like, you have higher survivability odds in the back of the plane
But when you’re sitting in the front during a crash the snack cart comes by one more time.
Jump seat behind pilot for helicopters, I assume due to the supporting framework from the engines and not in blade range.
Middle of planes over the wing root - easy access to exits, crumple zone infront, not going with the tail if it hits, and strongest part of aircraft. Also right over a fuel tanks, so results vary.
The stats of surviving in a plane are quite high.
The stats of surviving in a plane with at least one death are very low.
Usually, if anyone dies, everyone dies.
No, people die on planes all the time. Almost 3 million people fly daily, I’m guessing people die in flight almost every day due to natural causes.
However, I’m sure the stats with 2+ people dying, survival odds are quite low.
Honestly I wasn’t going to bother specifying this but yes obviously you’re correct. Alternatively it can be thought of as, “in a plane accident, if anyone dies, usually everyone dies”
Fair enough, I just figured since we were being particular, better specify lol
Almost certainly true of ocean landings. But I’ve spent a lot of time in bush planes (no crashes, knock on wood). I’ve had colleagues survive crashes where others have died. Perhaps it is sample bias, or something particularly about remote crashes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Air_Flight_6560 – two of the survivors were in the back, both working for our company. After the crash: one never returned, one just quiet quit over the next year or two.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/yellowknife-plane-crash-kills-2-people-1.987369 – this plane crashed into our office building, killing the pilots, but the passengers all survived. I wasn’t there, but coworkers would often describe the experience inside the building.
It happens often enough that I have two examples where I’m only one degree of separation.
I had two colleagues survive a helicopter crash into a lake at full speed (calm day, no waves, pilot lost track of where the surface was) – one of my coworked was ejected out the front window of the helicopter (seatbelt was on). Didn’t even warrant a news story. But everyone survived this one, which may be a data point in your favour.
I don’t have an actual source for stats. Got anything?
Jesus Christ what kind of work do you do
As far as source, my ass. I heard it somewhere else (talking about commercial airliners) and it passed the smell test
At the time, arctic mineral exploration. However I blew out my knee and started a business with lower personal risk (equipment targeting the same market) ;)
Free photo – me doing science in the arctic in winter (February, so the sun is up) with curious caribou checking it out
Damn, that sounds super cool! Need a hand? 😄😄
Kind of. My own business will probably needs to hire a tech sometime in the next six months. Ideally someone technically inclined with a steady hand (who can be trained to solder connectors onto cables, etc.)
Oh, the arctic exploration stuff? My old employer is Aurora Geoscience – they have a careers page. There are others like them, depending on your citizenship and location. Many of these companies will hire labourers and semi-skilled technicians who want the lifestyle. You won’t get paid a lot – but it’s kind of like the military experience without the guns and you come out knowing how to do a lot of shit. A good life experience. :)
I wish I had known about that when I was younger. I would have done that instead of the military.
Test pilot for planes put together by drunks.
It’s like in poker, show one, show all
You also have hugely increased survival odds with backwards seats.
I think this every time I’m the back which is loud because of the engines.
I’m sensitive to noise, and usually book late enough that the only seats available are in back. And fly at least once a month.
Absolutely decent noise cancelling headphones are available for under $70 US last time I bought some. Mine were called Q30 or something, and they were better than my Sennheisers from 2016-ish. Worth every bit. If one can afford a ticket, one can afford this one thing to make it less awful.
I concur. I went high end though with Sennhauser cause I’m a nerd. Great investment.
Yeah I rarely fly so I don’t bother.
Tell that to the people in the back of the plane on Lost 🤣
Actually…nah, I’m not going there. But if you watched Lost, you know what I’m going to say.
Is he clicking or unclicking it?
I thought he’d be unclicking it by context, but with the hand position it must be clicking it together.
Neither, he’s cucking the seatbelt
Why does it say cuck on his pants though
its keming/kerning L and I to make u
I think it really does help in crashes though.
Similar to a car crash, you are generally safer in your padded engineered metal box than being thrown out of it, or thrown around inside it.
It’s like the difference between dropping a carton of eggs vs a bunch of loose eggs in a box.
So it doesn’t matter on Southwest?
There’s always a first…
During the cattle call, we’re all just cattle…
Do they think your odds get better if you’re get thrown down a metal tube on impact?
since it’s halloween, i cackled at this…Extra Fabulous!!
