Flying can be scary for a lot of people, and turbulence makes it even worse. When the plane starts shaking and bouncing around, passengers often hold onto their seats and hope it ends quickly. But a pilot from Florida says there’s actually a way to feel less turbulence, and it all comes down to picking the right seat when you book your flight.
Joey Miuccio is a commercial pilot who shares flying tips on TikTok. He has thousands of followers who watch his videos to learn about aviation. When someone asked him where they should sit if they hate turbulence, he had a simple answer based on how planes work during bumpy conditions.
“Definitely not in the back,” Miuccio said in a TikTok video. He said the back of the plane is actually the worst place to sit if you want a smooth ride. To help people understand why, he did something called the pen trick. He grabbed a pen and held it in the middle, then started shaking it around. The ends of the pen moved a lot more than the center part where he was holding it. This shows exactly what happens on a plane when it hits rough air.
So where should nervous flyers actually sit?
The pilot says your best bet is to sit near the wings or maybe a little bit in front of them. This part of the plane is where the center of gravity sits, which means it stays more balanced. Miuccio explained that turbulence affects the whole plane, but some seats feel it more than others.
The further you are from that center point, the more you’ll get bounced around. Much like how a Range Rover owner had to keep going back to fix the same problem, people who always pick seats in the back might keep having rough flights without knowing why.
Other pilots agree with this advice. A captain who flies Boeing 737 planes told a travel website that you should think about it like a seesaw. When you sit right in the middle of a seesaw, you barely move. But if you sit at either end, you go up and down a lot more. The same thing happens on planes during turbulence.
For most regular planes like the Boeing 737 and Airbus A320, the sweet spot is usually somewhere between row 10 and row 30. The exact rows can change depending on what kind of plane you’re on, so it helps to look at the seat map before booking. A good trick is to look for the emergency exit rows over the wings, since those are usually right in that stable zone.
But Miuccio also wanted people to know that turbulence isn’t actually going to hurt the plane. These aircraft are built really strong and go through tons of testing to make sure they can handle even really bad turbulence. The Federal Aviation Administration says turbulence almost never causes planes to crash. The last big crash that happened mainly because of turbulence was way back in 1966. Yes, people can get hurt during turbulence, especially if they’re walking around without their seatbelt on.
But serious injuries are pretty rare. Between 2009 and 2021, only 146 people on regular commercial flights got seriously hurt from turbulence. When you think about how many billions of people fly every year, that’s a really small number. Getting the facts straight about safety can help calm your nerves, similar to how understanding what’s really happening in a confusing situation makes everything clearer.
