It is often said that occupying the last rows on an airplane is particularly uncomfortable, noisy, almost nauseating. That in front you can breathe better, feel less the effect of gravity on take-off and the impact of the landing gear. It may well be, but it remains much more advisable than occupying the top positions, even in business class. AND if there really is a place to absolutely avoid, that is not the 17th or 13th (depending on the superstition of the country of origin), but the 7th. To be precise, the 7A.
To say all this is not the sorceress or the urban legend of the moment, but the site of the Daily Mail, which under the gigantic photograph of a boeing 727 cut in half reports of a TV documentary made by the English public network Channel 4 which gave an account of a very expensive experiment (it cost over a million and a half pounds): a crash test to verify aviation safety.
The plane in flight, stuffed with mannequins, cameras and sensors, is abandoned by the pilot-parachutist at an altitude of just under 800 meters and crashes like an inanimate kamikaze in the Sonora desert in Mexico. It was a question of seeing the effect such an accident has (would have) on the passengers. A disaster, of course. With some surprising distinctions, though. The safest seats are those located behind the emergency exits, and not as close to the cockpit as previously thought.. Therefore, the further back you are, the greater the chances of saving yourself. Or, in other words, the more you pay, the more you risk: the wealthy patrons of the business class would mostly be doomed, regardless of their economic and social status.
The most expensive ticket would therefore be nothing more than a bait and switch. But what has impressed is the deadly precision that affects seat 7A in particular: sure death. “Certainly died”, writes the Daily Mail. It will be almost equally probable that after this test many airlines, which until now had canceled rows 13 and 17, will now do the same with 7. In comparison, in the other two you are in an iron barrel.
