Kabuki Seating

Every time I enter an airplane to go on a trip, I wonder why the passenger seats do not face towards the back. It is so very obvious that in a crash, one’s body goes forward, so that the well constructed seats with their impressive (and uncomfortable) headrests serve no purpose except to act as a hard barrier to the person behind. I am reminded of this absurdity every time the Stewardess goes through the Kabuki theater of telling passengers to bring their seats to an upright position and make sure the seats are fully in the upright position. They in fact do a walk through the cabin to see if these rules are being followed. I often feel like asking the Stewardess what is the purpose of this ritual but then remember what happens to anyone who complains on an airliner these days. The same situation occurs on a train (of course in Europe where passenger trains really exist), except that on trains some people actually have backward facing seats and will probably survive a crash.
If you do a simple Google search on “airline seats facing forward” you can easily obtain multiple articles on this problem. Turns out that I am not the first to recognize this. There is a long history. In fact, all military airplanes have seats facing towards the back. Obviously the military wants its soldiers to have the best chance of surviving a crash whereas domestic airlines clearly do not care about the safety of the passengers. It seems that one strong reason for this lack of concern is economic, in that backward facing seats would have to be greatly reinforced since most of the impact force is higher on the seat and this would involve substantial costs to the airline! Another economic reason is that the airlines think that passengers prefer facing forward. And yet another is that most passengers have never thought of this problem at all and airlines prefer to keep it a secret.Substantial research has been performed on this safety issue with the universal conclusion that survival is better in rear-facing seats. For example, Richard Snyder, a scientist studying airplane crash protection published a paper in 1983 with the title” Impact protection in Air Transport Seat Design” which had this conclusion.
Of course it is irrational to except that any profit-making company would on its own increase passenger safety when money is involved and when most people do not even know the problem exists. Just look at the history of seat belts and air bags in cars. But I am an optimist (except in the case of human-caused climatic warming!) and hope that this will happen in my lifetime.