Why aren’t car-like 3 point seatbelts used in planes?
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People think plane crash is a jet crashing into the ground at 600 mph and exploding.
And yes, in that scenario, no seatbelt is going to help. It’s the deceleration that kills you, and going from 600mph to zero in no time at all is definitely going to do that.
However there are a lot of other more survivable types of plane crashes. Such as runway overruns. And these types of accident are much more common. They don’t involve as rapid a deceleration as a car accident, in the main, and there’s often warning that it’s going to happen – for example, an aircraft with hydraulic problems returning to the airport might overrun the runway due to poor braking performance.
Because there’s warning, you can go into the brace position, and brace against the seat in front. And if you don’t, the seat in front is designed to fold forwards as you hit it to minimise the damage.
Unless you’re in certain types of business class or first class seats, especially the angled types. These seats often have shoulder belts, like in a car, because there isn’t a proper brace position you can take.
It’s also worth pointing out that adding the structural weight to have a car-like seatbelt to every seat would be pretty significant, but not really help many people survive a crash, given how rare a plane crash is.
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