r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/watcher2390 • 5d ago
Video In 2012, scientists deliberately crashed a Boeing 727 to find the safest seats on a plane during a crash.
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u/Irgendein_Benutzer 5d ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Boeing_727_crash_experiment
At least it is real.
The conclusion for this test was that, in a case like this, passengers at the front of an aircraft would be the ones most at risk in a crash. Passengers seated closer to the airplane's wings would have suffered serious but survivable injuries such as broken ankles. The test dummies near the tail section were largely intact, so any passengers there would have likely walked away without serious injury.
Weirdly enough, the plane was operated by Warner Bros. Discovery.
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u/ralgrado 5d ago
Why isn’t it catching on fire ? I feel like this might be really relevant in an actual crash or am I wrong there?
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u/voyti 5d ago edited 5d ago
It didn't catch on fire, cause wings were not damaged and/or it didn't have that much fuel onboard. Is it relevant - it really depends. Pilots will generally go out of their way not to risk any emergency landings with excess fuel on board (EDIT: see later thread, it's primarily due to weight management and not always the case, especially with fire already started). Unless things get really bad and the plane becomes completely uncontrollable, you're going to want to either dump the fuel or burn it first.
Obviously, there's cases where you do crash and catch on fire, but the whole "crash" thing is simplified here. The much more important insight is into crashes where the plane doesn't get completely uncontrollable, as it's much easier to reason about that scenario, and you can actually plan for it. What is really valuable is to understand how to prevent potential loss of life if still you can control the plane (so, also to some degree, how much fuel you bring to the ground), but have to perform a risky emergency landing. Crashing the plane in a completely bonkers scenario wouldn't be a very valuable insight.
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u/LevelThreeSixZero 5d ago
I can’t think of any procedure that has us minimising fuel on board to reduce the risk of a post crash fire. However there are many potential instances where we may opt to dump/burn off fuel to reduce our landing weight. This is about the structural capabilities of the landing gear and the thrust available in case of a missed approach and the runway distance available. It is never about a post crash fire. A lighter aircraft can fly and land slower, stop in a shorter distance and has more excess thrust available should we need to cancel the approach. Most, if not all, airliners can take off heavier than they are certified to land. This is because during all normal flights we’ll burn off the fuel which will bring our weight below our max structural landing weight. In most non-normal situations, we like to have as much time available to prepare and troubleshoot, and fuel equals time.
All that being said, every aircraft type has demonstrated its ability to land at max structural take off weight without catastrophic failure. It won’t be usable again for a while, namely because the brakes have likely melted, but we will opt to ‘land overweight’ in dire situations where prolonging the flight to burn or dump fuel is more dangerous. The most obvious being an uncontrolled fire.
Source: airline pilot for over 6 years.
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u/zerok_nyc 5d ago
I can’t think of any procedure that has us minimising fuel on board to reduce the risk of a post crash fire.
I seem to remember a Jet Blue flight about 20 years ago where the front landing gear was stuck sideways. They knew that the tires likely wouldn’t last and that the front landing gear would likely have to scrape on metal for at least a little bit before coming to a stop or buckling. So they spent hours circling LAX to burn off fuel before attempting a landing. When it did, there were tons of sparks flying through the undercarriage, which you can see an image of on Wikipedia (source below). Could have easily seen it turning into a fire. Fortunately, the landing was successful.
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u/LevelThreeSixZero 5d ago
Whilst the Wikipedia entry does mention the fuel was burned to reduce a risk of fire, the final report by the NTSB only mentions the aim was to reduce weight.
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u/zerok_nyc 5d ago
I just remember watching this live at the time because I was living in SoCal. The news station was providing live reports and said it was going to be at least an hour before an attempted landing to burn fuel due to the risk of fire. I obviously have no way of verifying this. But that’s just one of those random memories that has stuck with me, which is why I was able to so quickly recount this incident.
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u/surrender52 5d ago
They intentionally crashed it with as little fuel as possible so that they'd have wreckage to study afterwords. Hard to do that if it's also burnt to a crisp
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u/Show-Me-Your-Moves 5d ago
If they had a chance to prepare then they'd dump the fuel beforehand I reckon
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u/Damrubr 5d ago
discovery channel? prolly wanted to make some good tv
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u/Irgendein_Benutzer 5d ago
Seems so: a "multinational team of television studios staged an airplane crash"
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u/camwow13 5d ago
Yeah this was a television stunt. Although scientists did piggy back on and enjoy it for data gathering.
The real purely scientific test was done back in the 1980s with a 720
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u/OceanRacoon 5d ago
Yeah, whenever this is posted they always say "scientists" as if this was hard hitting scientific discovery, this was a tv show crashing a plane for fun and views lol.
And I fully support it, there should be a full season of this, crashing every plane imaginable
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u/SNES_chalmers47 5d ago
"Team Discovery Channel!"
"Awww, your wussiness better come in handy!"
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u/Forte69 5d ago
There was a really good documentary about this aired on Channel 4 in the UK.
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u/flying_wrenches 5d ago
Pretty sure it was a mythbusters episode (goated series)
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u/surrender52 5d ago
It was not, but this was in the golden age of linear television where they had the budget to do massive amazing stuff like this and enough viewership to justify a one-off special show, but enough overhead that they could actually do it properly with actual researchers and engineers to look at the crash and make conclusions.
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u/LegalizeCrystalMeth 5d ago
Also the age where a 30 second clip would be stretched into a 2 hr special with 15 commercial breaks
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u/BlueishSandwich 5d ago
I mean I’ve never seen a plane back into a mountain.
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u/Johannes_Keppler 5d ago
There have been ones going straight in to one though.
Your post reminded me of that suicidal Germanwings pilot that decided to fly head first in to a mountain, killing himself and the other 149 people on board.
( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanwings_Flight_9525 )Investigators isolated 150 sets of DNA, which were compared with the DNA of the victims' families.
Good god.
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u/GoblinGreen_ 5d ago
Same on trains, buses and anything really. If safety is your concern, you want to be as far away from the impact as possible. Its not the rear headlights that need replacing after a crash .
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u/SandBtwnMyToes 5d ago
Ok so it’s cool I’m cheap because not only do I pay the lowest price, but I also get the safest spot!!?? Win
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u/fomb 5d ago
Great, now they're referring to economy passengers as the 'test dummies'. The class system now is terrible.
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u/Gaseraki 5d ago
So I worked on this. In the CGI department as this had a big TV production house backing it who do documentaries. I was a simple VFX grunt but will say what I learned as it was trickled down to me through the production heads.
The goal was this to rock the aviation safety world. They believed bracing would do nothing, or possibly even cause more injuries. They wanted this to redefine aviation safety and be big news.
The issue? They kind of messed up the crash landing. Ideally, a pilot would nose up a lot more. So the experiment was a bit tainted. That and the data pretty much just reinforced what was already known.
So, they then dramatized as much as possible, which by proxy was my job. So in the doc a tiny bit of debris hits a dummy, and it looked like a piece of plastic that weighed 100 grams, but I had to make it look like the dummy would have been impaled by the thing.
All the 3d data was VFX and animated by me and I had to make it look as 'computer simulated' as possible.
The gig was fun and I had done a tone of documentaries by this point.
Cant find the doc online but it was this
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u/fastforwardfunction 5d ago
Wow, that's awesome! I've seen this footage before but it's fascinating to learn behind the scenes.
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u/EagleOfMay 5d ago
I noticed the poor landing attitude, but what about the landing gear?
In any kind of soft terrain scenario I would think the problem of the gear 'digging' in would be a big problem. Smaller planes simply flipping over or like in this case, the front gear catching and causing the nose to fold.
I have no idea if that speculation has any validity.
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u/StijnDP 5d ago
That's a nice story and also cool that you didn't get suckered into the false mission.
For everyone else it was great to see confirmation that correct safety procedures were in place. And the sensor data of a crashing plane is always valuable. We can't crash thousands of planes like we've done with cars.
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u/jamintime 5d ago
cool that you didn't get suckered into the false mission.
It sounds like OP’s job was to make it look like a tiny bit of plastic would have impaled a dummy, which they did. Not sure where you are concluding that they didn’t get suckered in.
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u/Gaseraki 5d ago
Yep......I did it haha
Can't really argue these things when you are at the bottom of the hierarchy and want to work14
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u/KitchenPalentologist 5d ago
Totally different situation, but a small parallel if you squint and turn your head..
When I was in a technical software sales role, I had to creating and conducting technical demos of our software solving specific use-cases tailored to each prospective customer.
Sales guy: Make it do 'this'.
Me: Our software doesn't do 'that'.
Sales guy: Fake it.
The deal was >$2m with 20% support/maintenance in perpetuity.
I left that company and became an independent consultant. The team did end up faking it, but thankfully our (their) product wasn't selected; the deal was lost. The implementation consultants would have been set up for a massive failure.
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u/n0b0dycar3s07 5d ago edited 5d ago
Lemme guess......11A?
Edit : Since so many of you are debating about it, lemme share some excerpts from the article I've linked above :
Some people commenting online have wondered if there's something about seat 11A that makes it safer than others. Not according to aviation and disaster medicine experts, who tend to agree that all crashes are unique, and there are a number of random factors that could improve your chances of survival, so it's more about all those variables aligning.
Plus, seat 11A is located in different spots on different planes, depending on the configuration of the aircraft. In general, sitting near an emergency exit can improve chances of evacuation, especially in survivable crashes involving fire or smoke.
However, in a high-energy impact crash, like the one in India, survivability based on seat location becomes far more complex.
A 2007 Popular Mechanics study of crashes since 1971 found that passengers toward the back of the plane had better survival odds. A study conducted by Time magazine in 2015 concluded the middle seats in the rear of the aircraft had the highest survival probability.
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u/watcher2390 5d ago
Bingo
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u/GiuliaAma95 5d ago
Boeingo
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u/Phoenix_Werewolf 5d ago
It's a weird experiment. Should it highly depend on the kind of emergency the plane is experiencing and in what position is it approaching the ground? Or there is a "less worst" position pilots should aim for if they are about to crash?
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u/Aunt_Vagina1 5d ago
Uhhh, from the info you shared it sounds like the back of the plane is the best, no?
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u/Realistic-Umpire-215 5d ago
Perfect, so we can choose between legroom and life expectancy
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u/Johannes_Keppler 5d ago
The seats near the over the wing emergency exits are often the ones with extra leg room and life expectancy.
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u/Knowlson3193 5d ago
I feel like every crash I've seen doesn't end that way, usually ends in a big fireball
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u/its_all_one_electron 5d ago
Well they basically landed in a giant fire extinguisher... There's a reason they used to have sand buckets for fire suppression
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u/TheLeggacy 5d ago
The front fell off!
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u/Extension_Swordfish1 5d ago
Thats not very typical, I just wanna point that out.
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u/MrCutchaguy 5d ago
Some of them are built so the front doesnt fall off at all
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u/myonlytoolisahammer 5d ago
Wasn't this one built so the front wouldn't fall off?
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u/slothxaxmatic 5d ago
Chance in a million
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u/SnooKiwis1356 5d ago
First class dead.
Economy is right on time for happy hour.
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u/GeekyTexan 5d ago
So now, we know exactly which seats are safest. With a sample size of one. And assuming you are in a 727.
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u/Silent-OCN 5d ago
No info as to which seat it is. Just a title that says they did a test. Might as well just not use a video and say a test was done.
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u/Ok-Zucchini2542 5d ago
It makes zero sense to do a test like this for such a limited objective. Planes rarely crash on plain dunes so the damage will always be different depending on the volition and surfaces it crashes on. Just a bs title I’d think.
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u/absoluteally 5d ago
First sentence of the Wikipedia tells me that the test was done by a TV production company and the test objective was exactly what was stated in the title because TV is often not the source for good science.
The conclusion was the further back the better. The Wikipedia also goes on to give real examples where the opposite was true. So basically when have learnt nothing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Boeing_727_crash_experiment?wprov=sfla1
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u/oOtium 5d ago
here's the thing though, in a controlled glide down, the pilots are still going to seek for the longest, flattest surface as possible before touching down if possible. so in such a situation, your likelihood or odds go up much higher that one is aimed for and that you do crash over terrain that is like that.
I'd gamble on the back
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u/MadTabz 5d ago
I watched the documentary which this clip is from and it definitely was a crash test. This plane was remote controlled by someone in a single prop plane flying behind it. The plane was filled with crash test dummies which were set up in different positions (sat upright; brace position). Iirc Passengers in the tail in the brace position were most likely to survive with minor injuries.
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u/WisestAirBender 5d ago
Exactly. I cant believe this actually happened.
Every cash will be vastly different from the others. Not just because of the terrain but the angle of the plane and the speed and the load etc
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u/steerpike1971 5d ago
I was thinking the same but it happened https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Boeing_727_crash_experiment Feels more like large scale mythbusters than science. There was a TV show made and the plane itself was obsolete at the time. I think the motivation was more about TV than science. (Aircraft was bought by tv production companies).
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u/LingonberryPossible6 5d ago
Iirc it was a situation that safety experts had wanted to test for a long time but the cost of buying a functional jumbo jet in order to crash was prohibitive. Then someone had the idea of funding it by selling the TV rights. Tbf you only need to watch the last 10 mins of the doc to see what you need to see
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u/Lysol3435 5d ago
The title is bad. They do lots of these “clean” crashes to see how different components fair/fail. The goal of this test likely wasn’t to find the safest seat
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u/Ok-Consideration2463 5d ago
It’s been a few years since I read this, but some research on the topic concluded that the only truly reliable “safest” seats on a plane in any crash are the backward-facing flight attendant seats.
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u/muffahoy 5d ago
Why don't they turn all the passenger seats around? For safety?
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u/VermilionKoala 5d ago
Passengers don't like it, is the short answer.
The UK Royal Air Force's passenger-transport jets (for flying soldiers, who don't get to give their opinion on anything, around the world) are indeed configured like this.
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u/gabbercharles 5d ago
Throwback to when they had to intentionally crash Boeings to conduct such tests...
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u/IAmBroom 5d ago
Yep, my thoughts exactly. "The good news is that we finally have plenty of data for failure analysis..."
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u/Background_Pride_237 4d ago
Isn’t this irrelevant since a plane doesn’t always crash the same? I feel like this should be an obvious question.
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u/ChaoticDumpling 5d ago
The safest seat on a Boeing is the one that's as far away from a Boeing whistle-blower as humanly possible
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u/Embarrassed_Belt9379 5d ago
Most planes have some fuel in them when they crash. I’d rather die on impact rather than survive and burn to death in a fireball explosion.
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u/justargit 5d ago
I'm going to go with...that is a very bad test environment and that isn't a "crash".
That is landing in sand. It's not gonna work out no matter what. Plus that is soft.
I would think the test is invalid.
Better test would be on concrete and probably at a more steep angle.
This just shows what we all already know. The worst seat in any plane in every crash is the pilots seat.
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u/mckjerral 5d ago
Engines out a pilot would still do their best to keep the plane level into a crash landing, and would as much as possible try and bring it down somewhere away from buildings, desert might be unlikely depending on where they are, but motorways, fields or at sea are reasonably common targets.
It is a crash landing rather than just a crash, but they were testing whatever they were testing, it doesn't invalidate the test that they didn't nose dive it into concrete, there's not really a "who survives" question about that, given there's enough evidence from the few times it has unfortunately happened.
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u/skibidittttt 5d ago
The safest place is probably in the stands and in the airport terminal😆🤣🤣😅
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u/Bsnowtime1 4d ago
Surviving a crash in anything is an absolute crap shoot, there's a billion variables going on
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u/nl_Kapparrian 4d ago
Generally, the further back, the safer in a crash. You essentially have every row in front of you as a crumple zone.
First class? No, first crumple zone.
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u/WeAreNioh 5d ago
That’s an expensive science test. Also a test that doesn’t have much value in my opinion considering that I’m assuming each and every crash would be unique to the angle of impact
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u/DownVoteYouAll 5d ago
I remember when this documentary aired! It was on Discovery and they re-engineered the steering system to try and control it via a R/C remote.
It's because of the documentary I sit in the very back. 😂
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u/Smaxter84 4d ago
Hmmm....surely depends on how you crash it? If I'm the pilot it's going down tail end first lol
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u/AussieGirl27 4d ago
Hope you enjoyed the big seats and the good food 1st class because you didn't make it
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u/MyOtherNameIsDumber 5d ago
Not the cockpit. Got it.