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Lessons From Flight 214: Should Airplane Seats Have Shoulder Belts ?

third eye

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Having suffered spinal injuries myself in a near similar situation whose life & career impacting ill effects will last forever, I strongly recommend shoulder belts like those in cars.

Lessons From Flight 214: Should Airplane Seats Have Shoulder Belts? | TIME.com.. ( Excerpts only)

They’re already available on some flights, but only in business and first class.

Among the list of injuries suffered by passengers of Asiana Flight 214 were head trauma, spinal fractures and “road rash,” a tally that reflects the tremendous battering that the 291 passengers and 16 crew members endured as the Boeing 777 clipped a seawall, lost its landing gear and skidded, nearly flipping over, into San Francisco International Airport.

Remarkably, more than 120 were able to walk away, and did not require medical care. And for that, they may have had their seats, and their seat belts, to thank. After loose seats contributed to injuries in plane crashes in 2012, some airlines have reinforced the track to which seats are bolted, preventing them from getting pulled away and collapsing on passengers during rough landings or crash situations.

But would a chest strap, like the ones now required in cars, have further reduced injury? “We don’t know the absolute benefit of adding a shoulder restraint to that kind of crash dynamic,”

In plane crashes, potentially life-threatening forces can also come from another plane — the vertical axis, causing spinal and skeletal injuries. And while it makes intuitive sense that more restraint with a shoulder harness would keep passengers from being jostled around and exposed to more damaging trauma, there simply isn’t the data to support that adding a chest strap would protect passengers significantly from further injury.
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Whether additional shoulder harnesses would have reduced some of the head or spinal trauma that some of the 19 passengers on Flight 214 who remain in critical condition experienced isn’t clear. But one passenger who walked away from the crash, Eugene Rah, told CNN he believes it might have saved him from further injury. The Boeing 777 included shoulder straps for seats in first class, and Rah said the chest belt kept him stable during impact. “If I did not have that, I would have hit the ceiling, that’s how hard [the impact was],” he said.

Read more: Lessons From Flight 214: Should Airplane Seats Have Shoulder Belts? | TIME.com
 
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