The actual answer is that the seatbelt is there to keep your ragdoll ass from bouncing off the ceiling during heavy turbulence.
Stupid question here, I guess, but why isn’t there a system to potentially deliver commercial passengers and crew to the ground in case of a crash? Military jets have election seats and parachutes, so why don’t we have at least something required for commercial aircraft in the same vein?
Is it the money that it would undoubtedly require?
Throwing untrained people out of a commercial airliner at high speed in the middle of a emergency is a good way to ensure no one survives. The equipment would add a significant amount of space, fuel and maintenance burden too, and require major compromises to the aircraft design itself. All to resolve a problem that effectively never happens.
Some valid answers are already given by other commentators. Just want to highlight that commercial airlines are operating barely cost positive. Every extra bit of cost added has to be at least covered by some other stream of revenue. How much more money can a seat in these crammed airliners make to cover the cost of R&Ding and maintaining additional safety measures?
Commercial airlines make a fuckton of money, but not in economy passenger travel. Cargo and elite passengers make the money.
Rigging a commercial airline with that many ejection seats would add significant weight to the plane. You’d probably triple the cost of commercial airflight if you did this just from reduced seating capacity, and even assuming that it could be implemented without that overhead I still don’t think this would actually help much.
Imagine you’re on Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 in a 737 Max nosediving towards the ground and the roof just opens up and launches you and all 148 of your fellow passengers out of the plane at 400MPH. Somehow I imagine that you just end up scattering the mangled corpses over a wider area.
Into the middle of the Atlantic ocean
In the event of catastrophic damage leading to explosive decompression it should keep you from being sucked out into thin air. Like if the roof tears off like that one time. Or that Boeing thing. Or that other Boeing thing. Or that other other Boeing thing.
Or keep you from bouncing and hitting the ceiling in cases of extreme turbulence. Or yo help on cases of lower-speed crashes (cases where the plane goes into some nosedive are less likely), etc.
…what? Obviously. It’s for turbulence, which is common. This comic is a joke, but not how it’s intended to be.
No, comics are the primary legitimate source of facts so I’m sure it’s true.
That sounds a bit sketchy… Now if you had presented that statement in comic form, I might believe it.
Here it is from the 1947 issue of, “Всегда лжец”
ai?
AI 😮💨
I’m not a good artist, and I’m a terrible public speaker. When I was born, the doctor looked at me and said, “This child is destined to be a software engineer.”
rare non-horny Extra Fabulous comic
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, 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.
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.
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?
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!
Yeah but the cartoon is funnier.
And when there’s a collision on ground. And when the pilot just breaks too hard after landing.
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.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=W5MbQaInrjc
For reference, the DC Metro is quite deep underground.
I like the use of perspective in that last panel
I think it really does help in crashes though.
Why does it say cuck on his pants though
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.
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.
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.
