Scott Pruitt, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, said that that it was “safer” to be in first class. And while traveling with larger seats, free drinks and attentive service is nice, the idea that first class is somehow safer than economy is wrong. According to pilots, experts and empirical data, the idea that one part of the plane is safer is incorrect. “First class is not safer than economy,” Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger III, the pilot famous for safely landing a plane in the Hudson River, said to The Washington Post. Meanwhile, Harro Ranter, chief executive of the Aviation Safety Network, said, “I cannot think of anything [that would make first class safer]. In an actual accident, best chances of survival are usually in the rear.” Time searched through the Federal Aviation Administration’s CSRTG Aircraft Accident Database looking for accidents with both fatalities and survivors and found that the person in the middle seat of the very last row of the plane as the best chance of survival. Time found that “the seats in the back third of the aircraft had a 32 percent fatality rate, compared with 39 percent in the middle third and 38 percent in the front third.” They also discovered that aisle seats in the middle of the aircraft had the highest fatality rate at 44 percent, while the middle seats in the back had the lowest fatality rate at 28 percent. However, the FAA notes that there is no real “safest” seat, and survival depends more on the circumstances of each crash.
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