Is There a Safest Seat on an Airplane? Here’s What the Data and Flight Safety Experts Say

This article was originally published in 2023 and most recently updated on August 13, 2026, with current information.

If you’re a nervous flier, you may find yourself wondering which seat on the plane is the safest. Does being seated in or near an exit row make a difference? And what about the front versus the back of the plane? We asked aviation experts to weigh in. Here’s what they had to say.

Is flying safe?

Flight anxiety is real and valid, but air travel remains one of the safest modes of transportation. Proportionally, fatal air crashes are extremely rare. According to Airports Council International headquarters in Montreal, in 2025, an estimated nearly 10 billion people flew on more than 100 million flights. The Geneva, Switzerland–based International Air Transport Association’s 2025 Annual Safety Report found that “the all-accident rate was 1.32 per million flights (one accident per every 0.76 million flights).” And as of July 2026, there have been no mass-casualty crashes of large commercial passenger planes, according to the Aviation Safety Network.

What’s the safest seat on a plane?

According to aviation safety experts and data, the safest seats are at the back of an airplane—but there are caveats. It depends on the accident type. One of the most thorough and frequently cited studies on this topic is the 2015 investigation by Time, which analyzed 35 years of data collected from the Federal Aviation Administration’s Accident & Incident database for aircraft. The reporters looked at incidents with survivors and fatalities, as well as available seating-chart information; that left them with a subset of 17 flights between 1985 and 2000.

Using this data, Time reported that seats in the back of the plane had a 32 percent fatality rate, as opposed to 39 percent in the middle of the plane and 38 percent at the front. Taking into account the position within a row, the study found that the best chance of survival came with rear middle seats (28 percent fatality), better than the survival rate for aisle seats in the middle section (44 percent).

The type of plane accident affects fatalities

The 2015 Time study did acknowledge that there’s a bit of randomness involved, saying, “Of course, the chances of dying in an aircraft accident have less to do with where you sit and more to do with the circumstances surrounding the crash. If the tail of the aircraft takes the brunt of the impact, the middle or front passengers may fare better than those in the rear. We found that survival was random in several accidents—those who perished were scattered irregularly between survivors. It’s for this reason that the FAA and other airline safety experts say there is no safest seat on the plane.”

Randy Klatt, a former U.S. Navy and commercial pilot and now a flight safety officer for the Washington, D.C.–based Foundation for Aviation Safety, told Afar, “Regarding actual crashes, the seats towards the rear of the aircraft are statistically safer. They simply have a larger survival rate over time mostly due to the physics involved in crashes. However . . . the kind of crash is the real determining factor. A high-speed vertical impact or in-flight breakup/midair collision makes seat selection irrelevant.”

Eckhard Jann, a retired safety manager and pilot for German travel group TUI and now a safety- and crisis-management consultant, agrees that “the cause for each accident in aviation is very different. . . . Nevertheless, there are seats that are known to be safer onboard airplanes: the last rows.” Professor Doug Drury, recently retired head of aviation at Central Queensland University in Cairns, Australia, concurs, writing in The Conversation, “The type of emergency will also dictate survivability.”

Klatt adds, “An aisle seat close to an exit is the smart move. Since ground evacuations are more common than actual crashes, it makes sense to pick a seat from which one can get out of the airplane quickly. If a person is physically capable of removing the [emergency exit door], then picking those seats would be smart. Wherever you sit, be sure to listen to crew instructions, understand where the closest exit is, and leave quickly while leaving all of your possessions behind.”

Experts interviewed by Time for a 2025 update of the original investigation agree.

What keeps you safe on a plane

Air-safety specialist and journalist Christine Negroni has written two books on aviation disasters, Deadly Departure (William Morrow, 2000, and recently released as an audiobook) and The Crash Detectives (Penguin, 2016), and she’s not convinced that existing studies about seat position have much merit.

“The few studies that have been done are flawed for several reasons,” Negroni says. “They focus only on fatal crashes, which is just 5 percent of airline accidents. Since those studies fail to represent the whole, I do not find them meaningful.” The best protective measure on a plane is perhaps the most obvious. “The safest seat on an airplane,” she adds, “is any seat that you are sitting in and buckled into.”

Negroni believes that attributing the outcome to seat location ignores the many complicated factors that can help or hurt survival: the location of the initial impact, whether or not safety measures malfunctioned (seat belts, oxygen masks, aisle lighting, etc.), the ability of flight crew to assist, danger outside of the aircraft, and more.

“These factors and many others create a multidimensional picture of survivability that is just not present in an equation that takes each fatal plane crash and notes the seat assignment of the dead passengers,” Negroni explains. “And, by the way, this does not even tell us whether the passenger died in that seat or somewhere else or on evacuation.”

Negroni believes that many of these studies ignore just how survivable most airplane incidents can be. She personally has lived through two emergency landings, “the kind with foam on the runway and ambulances standing by.” The experiences, she says, “make me see the fallacy in what so many people take as truth, which is that people don’t survive airplane crashes. But actually, they do.”

She continues, “Since the vast majority of air accidents are survivable, this means that the actions that passengers take before, during, and after the event are far more likely to have actual impact on their safety than where on the plane they are located.” It’s a vivid reminder that every seemingly minor detail during a flight has a purpose in keeping passengers safe: why seats have to be upright during takeoff and landing, why window shades are often opened, why cabin lights may be dimmed.

As an example, she points to the 2013 crash of Asiana Airlines Flight 214, when a Boeing 777 that had originated in South Korea clipped the end of the seawall as it landed short of the runway in San Francisco. “The aft end of the plane was jettisoned, and the front spun around, pivoting up and slamming back down to the ground,” Negroni says.

In the National Transportation Safety Board’s aircraft accident report, the three people who lost their lives in the crash are identified by their seat assignments, 42A, 41E, and 41B (41B was sitting in seat 41D at the time of the crash). “There were three deaths in the accident. Two passengers were not wearing their seat belts and were [thrown] from the plane when it fractured. . . . The third fatality was [someone] who was wearing a seat belt, but the seat itself separated from its support and collapsed.”

Which airline is the safest?

There is no single safest airline, but certain airlines are ranked higher than others. Each year since 2012, the Australian aviation safety and product review site AirlineRatings.com ranks the safest airlines based on a seven-point system.

The company monitors 300-plus airlines worldwide, and its methodology considers various factors: accidents that have occurred in the past five years, serious incidents (those with the potential for a catastrophic outcome) in the past two years, public and private safety audits, and the age of the fleet. Its 2025 rankings of the world’s safest airlines cover 25 full-service airlines and 25 low-cost carriers, and in total five U.S. airlines made the cut.

How to deal with a fear of flying

Having some anxiety around flying is not uncommon. If you find yourself nervous about flying, experts such as Lauren Palumbo have some tips for you. The licensed psychotherapist at New York–based psychotherapy practice Clarity Therapy says, “Instead of fighting the anxiety, simply acknowledge it and remind yourself that these feelings don’t signal danger. As in, ‘Oh, there’s this panicky feeling rising again. Just because I’m feeling this intense fear doesn’t mean I’m in actual danger.’ The idea is to recognize that the anxiety is a reaction to a perceived threat, not evidence of imminent catastrophe.”

So, before you start letting these studies influence where you sit, remember that your seat location is only one small (and relatively random) factor in the equation that decides your safety in an emergency. Instead, it’s infinitely more important to follow directions and listen to the crew every step of the way.

Barbara Peterson and Sophie Friedman contributed to the reporting of this story.