Well there are a lot of these airplanes going around the world all the time, and very seldom does anything like this happen. I just don’t want people thinking that airplanes aren’t safe.

Fan and turbine failures are supposed to be contained by the engine casing - it's part of certification. But as we see here, uncontained failures do occur. In general "airplane builders" do the absolute minimum to meet certification so they're not going to add reinforcement to protect against such an event until they're forced Into doing so by the authorities.

Turboprops can't, of course, contain a propellor failure which is why they have a big slab of armour in line with the prop disk. So in that case, yes, safety wins over cost and weight.

The comment you are replying to is a reference to a famous comedy skit (about the whole front of an oceanliner falling off, and the official company response).

whoosh..

Hopefully someone can give a more informed comment. For me, it's the seats directly in-line with the first turbine, and a few seats back.

edit: Well, I hope we are beyond boohoo LLM based info now. Here is Fable 5 High's explanation, and I loosely verified it. I post this to save many watts of energy due to others asking the same thing.

Simplified:

> I'd like to avoid seats in the rotor burst zone: the rows roughly in line with the plane of the engine's fan and turbine disks, plus a few rows fore and aft of that.

More details:

> The term you're looking for is the rotor burst zone — sometimes called the uncontained engine rotor failure (UERF) debris zone. That's the phrase an aerospace engineer or pilot would immediately recognize.

> Here's the physics behind it: the fan, compressor, and turbine disks in a jet engine spin at enormous speeds (turbine disks can exceed 10,000 RPM). If a disk or blade lets go and the containment case can't hold it, the fragments fly out tangentially — meaning they travel in the plane of rotation of that disk, perpendicular to the engine's axis. They don't spray forward or backward much; they carve out a relatively narrow band.

> FAA guidance (Advisory Circular 20-128A, which designers use to minimize hazards from these events) models the debris path as the plane of each rotor stage plus roughly ±15 degrees fore and aft of it. Since an engine has multiple rotor stages spread along its length, the combined hazard band along the fuselage is a few rows wide, centered roughly abeam the engines.

Ryanair has a pretty high safety record, they fly modern, well maintained planes because their margins are lower and they make them up in volume.

:)

"Low probability very high consequence situation has never happened to me, therefore I needn't do anything." -- someone who doesn't understand expectation in probability.

They will start charging extra for getting to not sit by a window.

Window: €12.99 extra.

You could do something with mirrors, but the safety cards reference looking out the windows before opening the emergency doors, so I bet you need at least SOME.

It's also so that rescue personnel can see into the plane in the event it crashes.

Presumably for the same reason looking out the windshield helps with car sickness.