The truth is that, statistically, planes are one of the safest ways to travel. But, with that being said, even walking out your front door is going to come with its fair share of risks. So for all you hyper-paranoid aerophobes out there, the UK’s Channel 4 is producing a documentary — The Crash — that attempts to officially settle, once and for all, which spot on an aeroplane least resembles that of a deathtrap.
After loading a Boeing 727 with cameras, sensors and breakable bone bearing crash test dummies, the documentary’s producers sent the ill-fated plane on a one-way nose dive into the Sanoran Desert in Mexico. What resulted was pretty bleak for the wealthy but gratifying for the hard-working plebs who spite them: the first 11 rows were entirely ripped away once the plane hit the ground. More specifically, the front of the plane got hit with a 12G force while the back of the plane got off (relatively) easy with 6Gs, leaving first class with no survivors as opposed to the 78% survival chance of the rest of the plane.
But even though this may seem like pretty damning evidence against the aircraft’s upper crust, Boeing is — naturally insisting that “no conclusive evidence is available”. And, either way, the chances of you actually being involved in a plane crash are fairly negligible — 1 in 4.7 million, to be exact. But on the off chance that you find yourself in that unfortunate 0.00002 per cent, better stick to coach. [The Telegraph]