I remember a BA Shuttle, Manchester to London, early 1980s. Pretty sure it was a Trident 3. My client had the forward facing window seat and I had the rearward facing one directly looking at him. Short sector, minimum fuel, and we went up from Manchester it seemed like a rocket, in a decidedly Non-Gripper attitude ! Restrained only by my seat belt, I really thought if that gave way I would fall directly into said client's face. He was a grumpy old git at all times. I started to laugh, had to control myself.
Originally Posted by
old,not bold
We looked very closely at installing rear-facing seats in F27-400s in the '70s, because the safety case was so strong. But we were defeated by the need to lose 2 seats as a result of the extra weight. The accountants were appalled by the notion that 2 seats, out of 44, should be sacrificed to safety. Only the RAF got away with it in those days, and very comfortable those VC10s and Britannias were as a result. My memory fails me on whether trooping contractors such as Eagle also had them.
Boeing actually did a serious study in the 1970s (they used to do those then) which looked in detail at this old sore of "only the RAF are concerned about safety". They examined multiple actual accidents and the issues arising.
What they found was that forward-facing was less susceptible to injuries. The key issue was not so much passengers being restrained by the seat back, but that in forward-facing seats you are much more protected from the vast amounts of detritus flying forward. Service carts broken free from their restraints. Cabin bags. Other passengers. Detached cabin fittings. Seat units. Etc. Forward-facing, the seatback protects you from most of this. Rearward-facing, you get it all smash in the face.
Anyone ever keep that report ?
UK trooping contracts did indeed long require rearward-facing seats. In those simpler times this just required two engineers, a box of spanners, and a couple of hours work. Overhead PSUs were placed to suit either direction. Plus the same to put them back afterwards. The aircraft could be quite intensively used and sometimes a delay meant there was not the time to put them back, so the next couple of scheduled sectors had to be done with reversed seats, to the surprise of the passengers. Both British United and British Eagle had accounts of One-Elevens on early morning domestic trunk runs where this happened.