Yeah, I always though that old myth came about because of the joke “You’ve never heard of a plane BACKING into a mountain, have you?”
Some back of the envelope math:
There’s about 1 death per 3 billion passenger miles on US commercial airlines. So, if the average flight is 1000 miles, then there’s a 1 in 3 million chance that your life will be prematurely ended during that flight. A year is about 30 million seconds long, so the expected value of this is that your life will be shortened by about 10 seconds for each year you expect to remain alive following the flight.
It takes maybe 5 minutes for the whole plane to empty out.
So even if the back of the plane were encased in a perfect magic invulnerability shield, you’re still better off sitting in the front row if you’re older than about 45.
Great math!
But … we figure 12 minutes from boarding door open to last passenger off for 737 / A320 / MD80 sized aircraft. It’s more like 15 minutes for 757 / 767 and 20 for 777 / 787 / A330 /A350. Your assumed 5 minutes might work well for RJs. which represent about 40% of all flights but more like 20% of all passenger journeys.
The median wait is a little quicker than the average wait, as the fastest rate of exit (people per minute) occurs close to the start of the process whereas at the very end we have the straggling folks with little kids or slow elderly.
Bottom line is, as you say, the benefit to the usable part of your lifespan from sitting up front is far greater than any imaginary reduced risk at the back. Flying non-stop is also a huge win-win: you have less total air time / air distance risk, one half the takeoff and landing risk, and no wasted time at the stopover. Massively worth the premium you might pay to get it.
Nicely done.
Of course, the pressure is now on to spend those few minutes that you save living a rich and productive life…
The flaw in this line of reasoning (which I’m sure you realize, I know your calculation was tongue-in-cheek) is in assuming that the utility of time is linear. By analogy, it’s usually rational for all but the wealthiest buy insurance with negative expected return to protect from catastrophic loss.
But still, this type of calculation really is worthwhile - it gives good intuition into just how safe air travel really is.
Just the fact that there were only 49 accidents with any fatalities on U.S. airlines between 1982 and 2009 sums that up quite nicely. In 2014 and 2015, there were roughly 9,500,000 domestic U.S. flights each year (Table 1). So even with a somewhat smaller number of flights back in the 1980s and 1990s, we’re looking at a denominator in the hundreds of millions. Of which only 49 had any fatalities at all. Lightning-strike odds.
So I doubt that many potential first-class passengers really care whether being in first class might carry a slightly greater risk, since the risk is so tiny.
I’ve only been on an airliner a couple of times and totally in coach, so maybe I’m wrong. But I’ve always thought that part of the reason for first class being up front is that the windows don’t just give a view of the top surface of the wing. I know most passengers don’t even look, but if you do, it seems like the view would be better from the forward cabin.
Depending on the length of the airplane, half to 2/3rds of coach is behind the wing.