True. Though I observed over the years that some 757 configurations had/have a mini-coach cabin forward of door 2. Mostly domestic variants where “first” is really “business” level seats. I more than once boarded a flight that had exactly *one *coach row forward. The airlines will find a way to cram the cattle in.
You misspelled “the customers at large will always choose cheap over comfortable”. 
I have never seen that seat map installed on an actual AA airplane. I wonder if that was either a long time ago or is/was the way the America West and/or US Airways aircraft were / are configured? The current AA website doesn’t show any seat maps for the 757, so that’s uninformative.
ETA … Reading the comments on pages in your cite, it appears the configs with some coach seats forward of the mid-cabin door are indeed still current. And are pre-merger USAirways / America West aircraft rather than pre-merger AA aircraft. Assuming of course that people correctly posted their comments to the correct seatmap.
I learn something new every day.
Actually, most people survive.
That article is completely misleading. It says:
Of course that’s true, but the vast majority of “accidents” are minor incidents with no fatalities at all.
The question at hand is among fatal accidents what is the distribution?
Here are the NTSB data on the 49 fatal accidents (i.e. at least one person died) between 1982-2009:
http://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/data/Pages/paxfatal.aspx
Of those 49 accidents involving at least 1 fatality, the distribution is:
10… minor, 1-2 fatalities only
2… 3%-10% of passengers die
3… 10%-30%
3… 30%-50%
2… 50%-70%
2… 80%-95%
27… >95% of passengers die
To summarize these data:
2924 people died.
2515 of those died in crashes where at least 95% of people on board died.
There are few incidents with intermediate numbers of fatalities, fatal accidents are indeed pretty much all-or-nothing.
All of which is why one should pay attention to the safety briefing, read the safety info card, and pay attention to the takeoff and landing with the idea of an evacuation actively in mind. Every single time.
In the majority of accidents people’s behavior, both as individuals and collectively, has a large impact (heh :)) on who and how many walk away.
Whether you’re in an accident or not is my problem. Whether you get out OK or not is (mostly) yours. Not entirely. But mostly.
And ref Reimann; when it’s not your problem it’s usually *really *not your problem.
Not all aviation accidents happen at cruising speed and altitude; many happen on takeoff and landing.
But other than that, I think you’re right… being in the back isn’t all that much safer. I wonder if so many people get that idea because there was so much exposure of that big iconic chunk of Delta 191 where most of the survivors were sitting.
I was quoting Joey P, who said, ‘ISTM most aviation accidents are all or none,’ not ‘most aviation accidents involving at least one fatality.’
@HMS Irruncible: Accidents happen when the airplane gets to the edge of the air. As long as we stay in the middle we’re fine. The hard part is loading and unloading while still up there. 
To supplement LSLGuy’s comment #25 with a tragic example: I know we had a jokey thread recently about people trying to get their bags from overhead bins during evacuations, but pretty much the only thing you can do as a passenger to improve your odds of survival is to pay attention and know how to evacuate efficiently.
Saudi Flight 163 declared an emergency soon after take-off due to smoke warnings, returned and landed quite safely, probably with everyone on board sitting comfortably in their seats. But every single person on board died.
More than 20 minutes after landing, the aircraft burst into flames, but everyone on board had died long before that from smoke inhalation. All would probably have survived if the crew had immediately initiated evacuation upon landing. Every commercial pilot knows the costly lesson from this incident and the importance of rapid evacuation, so passengers need not worry that a crew would make such a fatal error again, but it shows the critical importance of getting out as quickly and efficiently as possible without your phone charger if the captain calls for evacuation.
Well, I think we can guess the distribution of fatalities in non-fatal accidents. They would fall into the “none” category of all-or-none.
LSLGuy will know better, but while Saudi Flight 163 is often the butt of Asian or Arab aircrew jokes, I thought one hypothesis was that the crew were either already dead shortly after landingor that they had suffered enough exposure to fumes to incapacitate decision-making processes/suffered from confusion, (which IIRC is a symptom of smoke inhalation.)
They did the hard and tricky part (including returning, landing, moving passengers) but could not di the simple one?
ETA: Ref Reimann’s last post …
Agree in general.
Having said all that we have a process to go through to get the evac underway on an orderly fashion. It can legitimately take a minute after the aircraft stops moving to issue the evac order. For a planned evac like Saudia they could / should have been more ready to evac very quickly after they stopped rolling. For an unplanned event like the recent AA 767 engine failure at ORD, the longer time is to be expected.
That will be the longest 60 seconds of your life if there’s a fire inside or outside the aircraft.
An issue is that flight attendants ("FA"s) are trained to launch an evac on their own if the situation seems dire enough. But “dire enough” is poorly standardized and there have been horror stories of FAs opening doors and activating slides while the aircraft is still taxiing with all engines running. In some cases the first indication the pilots had that anything was amiss was seeing the “door open” message / idiot light appear on their panel. Meanwhile slides and people are going into engines. Oops.
I rode in coach the other day on a 737. At takeoff 100% of the window shades were down. Nobody had the slightest view of the outside. At landing it was almost the same. Maybe 4 total were up out of the 60-ish windows. Why? Folks wanted dark so they could remain glued to their tablets & phones with no glare.
That’s mightily dumb. If I was the King of FAA open window shades would be mandatory for takeoff and landing. However hard it was to get out of this http://www.baaa-acro.com/wp-content/uploads/1999/08/B-150-8.jpg it would be even harder in the dark with no outside references. Then again, out of 315 people on board that MD-11 only 3 were killed.
Even your own numbers don’t bear out your claim that “fatal accidents are indeed pretty much all-or-nothing.” This creates that perception that some vast majority of fatal accidents have 100% fatality rates, and that survivors of fatal airplane crashes are a rare thing. But what’s actually apparent for U.S. incidents (I assume NTSB doesn’t track foreign crashes, but maybe those numbers include them) is 44% of crashes have at least some level of survivors. Further, you don’t break down the 27 with >95% of passengers dying. How many of them were actually 100? “All or nothing” is a binary state, 99 out of 100 isn’t “all”, all isn’t like horseshoes or hand grenades, something is either “all of something” or it isn’t. So without further breaking down the 27, if say, half of those had < 100% fatality rate, that further undermines the claim that most airplane crashes are “all or nothing.”
You might be able to safely say “a majority of fatal airline accidents, most of the passengers die”, but I don’t much see any leg to stand on in the absolutist “all or nothing” statement.
23 out of 27 had 100% fatalities.
86% of total deaths (2515 out of 2924) occurred in incidents where >95% of passengers died.
If you want to quibble with my description of this distribution as “pretty much all-or-nothing” you can do so. If you think the accuracy of my description hangs on the difference between “pretty much” and your words “majority” and “most”, fair enough. But anyway, those are the numbers.
The official version of what happened probably only loosely correlates to what really happened. Investigations are real good at mechanical stuff and pretty good at what was said out loud. They’re not so good at piecing together the individual crew members’ thinking and the confusions and the miscommunications. Which are at the center of why this turned from an serious but potentially routine in-flight abort into a fiasco.
The aircraft did not depressurize after landing as it normally does automatically. In that state it’s physically impossible to open the doors. That much is a fact. I don’t know whether or when the FAs tried.
Physical evidence shows the pressurization controls operated by the flight engineer were in a non-standard configuration. But it’s also typical that those controls need to be adjusted for an emergency return, and also when an engine is shut down. I have no idea how much of what the engineer did was correct and step by step out of his book, him winging it under time pressure, or he just grabbed the wrong button/knob by mistake.
It’s pretty clear throughout the flight from the first hint of a problem that the FAs thought it was a far more severe problem than the Captain did. Which is not all that unusual, and often the Captain is correct. But why he persisted in that view as the situation continued deteriorating and disaster-level evidence continued accumulating is a mystery.
The end result is that a leisurely return to landing and a mis-set pressurization control led to a failed evacuation. And together those errors used up more survival time than was available. The exponential nature of a fire onboard doesn’t help in estimating useful time remaining.
Clearly the cockpit crew were on their very last legs as they cleared the runway. By then it may have been the Captain flying solo. The only reason I say “Captain” is that it’s not practical for the copilot nor engineer to have maneuvered off the runway in the time available; that action must have been done by the Captain. Had the aircraft not taxied off the runway at the end I could easily have believed the crew had set up an autoland and then were incapacitated in the minute or so before touchdown or immediately thereafter.
Conditions in the cabin would have been hellish at that point and only gotten worse in the next few minutes.
I think it has something to do with .999 being equal to 1.
They do hang on those words, because “pretty much” implies little alternative, majority/most more accurately reflects reality.
Jeebus, you missed out the tilde “~”! Are you trying to cause a fight?
It’s always cringe-worthy to use the word “hijack” in threads in this general area, but we’re now a long way away from what the OP asked about. And I’m a large part of the digression. Speaking just for me I’d like to return to our regularly scheduled thread.
I think the thread already has the answer–front of the plane was generally viewed as a more comfortable ride at one point (I’m no expert but on modern planes it’s always seemed the tail is the worst ride, and on the wing is the nicest, but you hear the engines more if you sit there), and most importantly for modern times you get to board/deplane much quicker and more conveniently if you’re seated up front. This is true even on flights with no first class (like Southwest flights), and is a good reason to grab front of plane seats whenever you can. The fact that in a narrow range of incidents being up front is worse safety wise is mostly irrelevant, people aren’t buying these seats nor are airlines selling them based on the statistically low death chance, and the even lower chance of seat position being a major determinant in survival.