Musings of a Compulsive Thinker

Assigned seating

It won't save your life, but it'll make somebody's job easier.

My topics have been rather middle-of-the-road lately. Time to raise a few eyebrows.

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So, really, assigned seating, specifically on commercial airliners. Besides eliminating the ridiculously long lines that would appear in airports if people thought an earlier arrival would get them a better seat on the plane, it helps crash investigators determine why the plane crashed.

The so-called "human wreckage" is particularly important in investigating when the airplane tanks in the ocean, because the structural wreckage itself, along with the black box, may be particularly difficult to recover. Bodies, on the other hand, float.

If a passenger was in his or her assigned seat at the time of the crash, the location, type, and severity of injuries found on the body can be documented; when you perform this analysis on a group of bodies and place each one into its proper context, the assigned seating chart, you have a pattern.

Without going into what some people would find to be unnecessarily graphic detail, I will say simply that the various injuries found on recovered bodies and/or fragments, when analyzed to form such a pattern, are a fairly good indicator of the cause and ensuing events of the crash.

So remember - next time you fly, stick to your assigned seat; it might not affect your well-being in the long run, but if you crash it could help tell the world why.

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Labels: engineering, travel

posted by the alygator @ 10:16 AM