Dr Michelle Dickinson: nanotechnologist on the new research on what makes the safest seat on the plane

When you board a plane, you probably think about whether or not you want a window or aisle seat that is either close to the bathroom, or far away.  But new research published in the journal AIP Advances concludes that when it comes to safety, who is sitting around you matters more than where you sit on a plane.

There’s a global aviation safety standard rule you’ve probably never heard of: every passenger must be able to evacuate a plane in 90 seconds.

But here’s the catch: it's based on controlled tests, under perfect conditions, involving calm people and ideal scenarios.

I've never been in a plane emergency, but I imagine people panic, aisles clog and not all passengers will move at the same speed. 
 
The new research asked a simple question - what actually happens during a realistic evacuation and does the passenger type and seating location affect survival?

The researchers built a full digital model of an Airbus A320 cabin and simulated emergency evacuations under one of the worst-case scenarios: a dual-engine fire. This scenario prevents the use of wing exits, forcing everyone to escape only through the front and back doors 
 
They ran 27 different scenarios with different passenger mixes and seating arrangements. 
 
Surprisingly they found that the fastest evacuation didn’t happen with the strongest, fastest passengers but instead when only 20 percent of passengers were elderly and evenly distributed near exits.

That scenario took 141 seconds. It still didn't meet the 90 seconds target, but it was the fastest of all of the scenarios and much better than the worst evacuation, which took over 218 seconds.

At first glance, the findings seem obvious. Older passengers move more slowly, which slows down evacuation, but the real insight is not just how many slower passengers you have, it’s where they are

Here’s what the study found: 

• Older passengers may move more slowly, take longer to react, need assistance and struggle in stressful, unfamiliar situations.
• Clustering slower passengers in one area creates bottlenecks
• Random placement causes unpredictable surges and congestion
• Even distribution smooths the flow and reduces jams
• When exits are limited (like in a fire scenario), small delays ripple outward and slow everyone down. 
   

This research is important because the world is aging, meaning that in the near future, more flights will include a higher proportion of older passengers.
 
The researchers suggest that airlines should strategically distribute slower-moving passengers evenly to improve safety, so maybe in the future your seating choice might be made by your age, not whether or not you like the window seat. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
You're listening to the Sunday Session podcast with Francesca Rudgin
from News Talks EDB.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
Joining me now with her science study of the week.
Doctor Michelle die can say, good.

Speaker 3 (00:16):
Morning, Good morning.

Speaker 2 (00:16):
Okay, this is a good one today, especially for those
who fly a lot, and I know that you are
fly a lot at the moment.

Speaker 3 (00:21):
And it's probably made me realize that I'm quite selfish
when I fly, and I haven't really thought about anybody
else on my flight. So here's my question Sunday morning.
When you are booking a flight, do you have a
preferred seat like your window or an aisle like do
you or do you not care?

Speaker 2 (00:37):
I'm an ale, yeah, becau it's not in the middle. Yeah,
you like to have to get up. I'd like to
be able to get up and move or go to
the low or kind of it's strictly ago out in
the aisle. Yeah, to get clipped by a trolley.

Speaker 3 (00:48):
So that's true, and then you don't want to be trapped.
The window is nice if you're sleeping, but then you
can get out for a week. All of these things.
So these are the things I always think about on
a flight. I had never thought about anybody else on
this flight until I read this article. It is published
this week in the journal AIP Advances if you want
to read it, and what it concludes is that when

(01:08):
it comes to safety on a plane, it is not
about where you sit. Is it about who sits around
you that matters more to your survival. And that was like, oh,
had on, I hadn't thought about this. So here's some
things I didn't know that I learned in this paper.
So there is a Global Aviation Safety Standard rule and
it states every passenger, in the event of an emergency,

(01:29):
every passenger must be able to evacuate a plane in
ninety seconds, no matter where you're sitting, right, doesn't actually
seem very long, but they've done all these tests, so
every plane has passed this test, so they've basically gone, yeah, totally.
The way that we've made the aisles and put the
seats and all the things means that everybody could actually
get off this in ninety seconds. However, when you look
into how they test this, it's based on control tests

(01:53):
literally perfect condition, so no real fire is happening, very calm.
Volunteers are told to disembark under a controlled pretend plane
crash and what you find is that it's a pretty
ideal scenario. And so these researchers went, do you know what,
I'm pretty sure in a plane crash, nobody's going to
follow the rules. Everybody's going to be panicking, people are

(02:13):
going to be pushing and shoving, and actually not everybody
is going to be the same in how they move.
So it said, we're going to do this research study
that says what actually happens during a realistic evacuation and
does the passenger type as in age, and the seating
location that they are put in affect everybody's survival And

(02:34):
this is now when you're.

Speaker 2 (02:34):
Going to get on a plane. But we're going to
get ages done.

Speaker 3 (02:36):
Yeah, we're going at superageous. So they ran twenty seven
different scenarios with different passenger mixes and everything else on
a digital model of an Airbust three twenty cabin, and
they did the worst case scenario, which is a dual
engine fire, which means that the middle doors can't open,
so you can only get out of the front and
the back exits right, you can't get out of the wings.

Speaker 2 (02:55):
Oh, why it's happening in ninety seconds?

Speaker 1 (02:58):
No?

Speaker 3 (02:58):
Well no, they basically said it's never going to happen
ninety seconds. That was the conclusion. The fastest they could
do it was one hundred and forty one seconds. The
worse they did it was two hundred and eighteen seconds.
And the thing that made it worse was old people.
They were basically like, basically, older passengers move more slowly,
which slows down the evacuation of the whole plane. And

(03:20):
so what they said is the best way to load
a plane. And this is where I go, Well, with
an aging population, now, when we book our seats in
the future, are they going to assume my age and
only give me options? Because this is what they said.
Older people are going to cluster, They're going to scrape bottlenecks,
and so what you need to do is randomly place
older people so they don't create surges and congestions. You

(03:42):
should never sit them together. So sorry, if you're on
your like fiftieth wedding anniversary to go somewhere, you actually
have to sit apart for the safety of the plane.
And so you know, maybe we're going to have a
with the aging population, We're going to have more elderly
people probably on flights. So they said, actually, if you
want to think about safety, older people shouldn't have a
choice in.

Speaker 2 (04:02):
Where they suits.

Speaker 3 (04:03):
They should be so randomly distributed they don't create butottlenecks
and eying.

Speaker 2 (04:07):
I don't know, I kind of get to the feeling
if you've got both engines on fire, maybe it doesn't
really matter we so, you know what I mean, it's
you kind of go. I don't know, maybe if we
just put them all on the sort of the emergency oil,
because then they can just kind of we can just
shunt them off down.

Speaker 3 (04:19):
They tried that. I don't do that because they actually
block the island. And then nobody really thought about this.

Speaker 2 (04:24):
I love it. I came to sell and that's something
for us all to think about. And next time we
book a ticket and someone seduced that you know, puts
you in a seat that you're not entirely happy with,
there might be a reason for it, depending on your age.
Interesting well took next week.

Speaker 1 (04:37):
Thank you for more from the Sunday session with Francesca Rudkin.
Listen live to news Talks it'd be from nine am Sunday,
or follow the podcast on iHeartRadio.