It might not be immediately obvious, but they have them for the same reason cars do.
Keeping you (and other passengers) in your seat (whether it is in a car or a plane) is an ideal way to stop you from smashing into other parts of the vehicle or other passengers.
Dying in a crash because another passenger snaps your neck, when you would have otherwise survived, is prevented by ensuring the other passenger doesn’t become a meat missile on impact.
* severe turbulence can throw you out of your seat and in some cases cause serious injury
* they keep you from leaving your seat in the event of a hard landing
* even in a normal landing, an airplane has to break pretty hard, having a seat belt on mean you don’t have to exert effort to stay in your seat
To hold passengers in their seats during turbulence (both expected and unexpected turbulence). If a passenger is not wearing the seat belt, it is likely that a sudden movement of the plane like the kind that happens during turbulence would cause the passenger to be thrown up out of their seat and hit the cabin wall, ceiling, etc.
The odds of surviving an airplane crash are 95%.
Seat belts and bracing are a large contributor to this.
The stereotypical high speed nose into terrain smash and burn type crashes are very very rare.
Most of the time the “crash” is a very rough landing somewhere it wasn’t supposed to or something weturbulancent wrong with a landing on a runway.
In which case the seat belt helped, by keeping the passengers in their seats and not flopping about the cabin getting hurt.
Also as mentioned elsewhere, turbulence.
To protect you and others, just like in a car.
First up, turbulence. It keeps you in your seat during heavy turbulence. Otherwise, you’d turn into a projectile, and get flung into walls/ceilings/floor/people. People get injured in turbulence quite a lot, and seatbelts help prevent this.
Secondly – crashes. In the same way as a car accident, a seatbelt stops you becoming a projectiles, and can prevent more serious injury. Without a seatbelt, your chances of survival drops.
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