A well spent $1.6 MILLION.
A team out of England crashed a standard commercial Boeing 727 in a desert in Mexico, and had state-of-the-art crash test dummies inside to figure out what you should do if you're on a plane that's going down.
Here are the four big findings:
#1.) Get in the brace position. That means wearing your seatbelt, leaning forward so you're touching your head against the seat in front of you, keeping your feet on the floor, and keeping your arms in. The dummies in that position ALL survived.
#2.) Just wearing a seat belt isn't enough. The dummies who had seat belts on but weren't in the brace position mostly survived, but would've suffered significant head injuries. All the dummies not wearing seat belts would've died.
#3.) Don't sit in first class. This is probably not an issue for most of us, but when the plane went down nose-first, everyone in first class would've died. The further back people sat, the higher the chances were they survived.
#4.) You'll probably survive a plane crash. Overall in the experiment, 78% of people survived. That's more than three out of four.
