Why must my flight seat be fully upright before the plane lands?

Question

And why do flight attendants enfore this like it’s life or death?

In: 39

Answer 1

Hello. Commercial pilot here.
There’s two main reasons here. The brace position for the person behind you is based on your seat being upright. If it’s reclined even slightly that person has less room.
Secondly it’s because of evacuation. If you need to squeeze passed a reclined chair then that adds a few seconds on to the evacuation. Scale that up to half the aircraft and you add minutes to the drill. Minutes mean lives potentially.

An added little nugget of information is that evacuation is a huge deal for airlines. Imagine being on an aircraft, sitting on the tarmac waiting to taxi out and takeoff and then you hear a voice say “emergency, evacuate!” The panic that is likely to spread through the aircraft is very likely to cause injury to the infirm. People will forget how seatbelts and doors work, only about a third will have paid attention to the safety briefing and the primal survival instincts (it’s me or them) might kick in. Simulations have been run and data collected from accidents to try and improve how people react, so anything that buys back a second here and there is a massive benefit. You may notice next time you’re on a flight that people sitting next to emergency exits are generally what is termed as “able bodied passengers.” Essentially, people that have been assessed as being able to open a door and help people through it should they need to. They explain how to unclip the seatbelt so that it’s in your short term memory. The cabin lights are dimmed so that if you need to get off the plane rapidly your eyes don’t need to adjust to the lighting outside the aircraft. All of these things are based on data and the time benefit.
Lastly, that nice friendly cabin crew member who is serving you drinks and selling you scratch cards will turn in to a drill sergeant as soon as you need to get off that aircraft in a hurry. You will be shouted at in short, sharp instructional bursts to make you just see and do. Again, valuable seconds bought back.