Katherine Cooper of Xenia, Ohio wonders why the seats in military aircraft face the back of the plane. “It is my understanding that seats are placed in this position for safety,” she writes. “I was under the impression this would protect passengers in case of an aircraft emergency like a sudden deceleration on the ground. Is this so? And if so, why is it that commercial airlines continue to put the seats facing forward?”

People have been debating for at least half a century which way airplane seats should face—forward or backward. According to an article in the December 1952 edition of Naval Aviation News, “Passengers in Navy transport planes have ten-fold better chances of coming out of crashes alive, thanks to backward-facing seats which are being installed in all new planes….The Navy has decided to install the seats after five years of development and testing showed they gave passengers much more protection for the entire back, neck, head and parts of the arms and legs in sudden stoppages. The human body can absorb more shock by the back than by the chest and abdomen, flight surgeons say.” The unsigned article cites two Royal Air Force accidents involving a four-engine Hastings and a two-engine Valetta. Both had rear-facing seats that were credited with minimizing injuries to passengers.

Aft-facing seats were used in Britain and the U.S. as early as 1945, according to the article, but “it took time to prove their advantages justifying the added cost of converting the seats….Navy passengers seem to like the rearward-facing seats. BUAER [the Navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics] distributed questionnaires to passengers during first months of experimentation with them. More than 500 were questioned after a flight, with only a few voting against them and none advancing a convincing reason for their opinions.”

Not long afterward, Britain’s Flight magazine ran an editorial in its July 16, 1954, issue praising a talk by one G./C. A.C. Dudgeon, D.F.C., of Britain’s Transport Command. “It was an informative, persuasive and entertaining talk, and it put the advantages of the aft-facing seat into very clear perspective—no wild claims, no concentration on one aspect of survival to the exclusion of all others. Subsequently a very lively discussion developed and someone called for a show of hands. I was surprised to see that four-fifths of a reasonably well-informed audience (consisting of members and guests of Aviation Forum) were in favour of the rearward-facing seat for all civil transport aircraft.”

Dudgeon was an early crusader for aft-facing seats, citing research dating back to 1942. The Flight editorial dismissed as “fatuous” the airlines’ worry that passengers would view aft-facing seats as an admission that accidents were possible. “One might carry this argument further,” wrote Flight’s editors, “and advocate the abolition of lifejackets and instructions on how to wear them.”

The same magazine revisited the subject in 1964 with another editorial, “Rearward-facing Seats NOW?,” that provided more technical detail. The center of gravity of a decelerating person is six to nine inches higher when facing aft than when facing forward due to the placement of the seatbelt, according to the article. Because the force of impact would be applied higher on the seat, airlines would have to strengthen the seat’s attachment to the floor. This, the editorial acknowledged, would add weight, and would translate to fewer passengers or the need to carry more fuel. “At present, with airlines losing money almost everywhere, it is only too easy to understand their antipathy for this subject,” say the editors. Yet they also cite a 1958 accident involving an airliner in Munich, Germany, which crashed on takeoff with the Manchester United soccer team on board. Those in forward-facing seats were killed, and those in aft-facing seats were saved.

In 1983, Richard Snyder, a research scientist studying crash protection and transportation safety at the University of Michigan, published a paper titled “Impact Protection in Air Transport Passenger Seat Design.” Snyder wrote, “Data appear to overwhelmingly substantiate that the seated occupant can tolerate much higher crash forces when oriented in the rearward-facing position.” He concluded that aft-facing seats were safer, and still holds to that view today. Now retired from teaching, he replied by email from his home in Arizona, “The basis for providing aft-facing seating impact crash protection is substantial and supported by over half a century of experience.”

Despite the research, we all face forward. Car companies, including super-safety-conscious Volvo, aren’t planning to turn passenger seats around anytime soon, and newborns are the only ones who face aft in automobiles. Most train and bus seats face forward. Airplanes just follow conventional practice.

That didn’t stop Bern Case from campaigning to change the standard. In the summer of 1987, Case was working at the Tri-City International Airport in Saginaw, Michigan (today he’s the airport manager for the Rogue Valley International-Medford Airport in Oregon) when Northwest Flight 255 had a disastrous accident on its next stop after Saginaw. The MD-82 had barely taken off from Detroit when it stalled and crashed into the embankment of a freeway overpass, killing 155 passengers and crew members. Only four-year-old Cecilia Cichan survived.

As Case learned the details of the tragedy, he became convinced that rear-facing seats would have saved lives. Throughout the 1990s, he contacted agencies, companies, and airlines, pushing the idea of rear-facing seats. By the end of the decade, he’d given up. “These numerous studies are just ta-ta’d away with clichés,” he says today. “Airlines say passengers wouldn’t like to face backward. But military airplanes and corporate jets have them.” And, he adds, their passengers report no problems. When former president Bill Clinton came to Oregon during the 2008 presidential campaign, Case was invited to board his charter plane, and noted that Clinton had chosen a rear-facing seat.