How many lives would be saved if the airlines turned all the seats around? The psychology and history of forward-facing seats has been answered well already here. I ask instead about how bad it is that seats are forward-facing.

For context, I was looking through Wikipedia's list of airline flights that required gliding, and a surprising fraction of the 30 incidents listed were fatal to some, but not all, of those aboard (47%). Averaged across the 30 incidents we get that 25.1% of those aboard died (noting that this average is pretty unscientific, and is subject to sampling and coverage biases; it's still interesting). Even among just incidents with fatalities on average less than half of those aboard died! I generated a scatter plot of the incidents:



This data surprised me a lot! My layman's intuition says that emergency landings should be a lot more bimodal, with basically all landings either being gorgeous US Airways 1549 style happy endings, or blazing fireballs with no survivors, with some very rare exceptions. Based on this intuition, I always figured it was reasonable that passenger seats face forwards; I thought "rear-facing seats wouldn't help that much anyway, edge-cases where it would have made the difference will be the rare exception to the rule".

But is this really true? It seems that maybe many deaths on commercial flights are incidents in this intermediate region, although I don't have the expertise to evaluate if rear-facing seats would help with how people typically die in commercial airline accidents.

Question: As a really rough ballpark, how much safer would commercial airline flights be (averaged across all commercial flights globally) if the seats were rear-facing?
The evidence is not the most recent one, but


  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 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.


Unfortunately, the link to the 1952 edition ends in a 404. Thanks to the detective work by Gerald Schneider we now have a working link. The article is on page 27. Another source cites a 1957 study, without a traceable source:


  An Air Force study in 1957 reviewed a series of crashes and concluded
  that injuries were seven times greater among passengers facing
  forward.


That a backward-facing seat is safer is indisputable, but quantitative data is very hard to find. Given the much higher wing loadings and landing speeds of modern airliners, possibly those ratios cannot be translated to modern aviation. While in the days of propeller-driven transports the difference between the forward- and backward-facing position might indeed have meant that the latter provided a significant advantage in survivability, the deceleration level in a modern airliner crash might make both equally unsurvivable. In addition, the data from mostly young, fit and healthy subjects involved in crashes of military transports might not translate easily to todays untrained, middle-aged and overweight passengers.

Circumstantial evidence cited in this 2016 study, however, indicates that even for modern airliners seating position is important. For an A340 runway overrun accident in Toronto in August 2005 it cites the Canadian TSB as saying:


  ‘One of the cabin crew, seated in the same general area as the crew
  and passengers who incurred serious impact injuries, was not injured.
  This cabin crew’s seat was aft-facing; the other seats were
  forward-facing.’


Another more recent paper gives more modest advantages: This 1996 study by the European Transport Safety Council lists them in a table and awards rearward-facing seats with only a 5% advantage overall or 19% if based only on impact fatalities:



Commenting on the table, the numbers are based on the 1995 Cherry study (CHERRY, R.G.W. and Associates Ltd (1995) Analysis of factors influencing the survivability of passengers in aircraft accidents Vol. I-III. EU DG VII contract) and 


  These particular figures are not quoted in the study, but have been
  calculated from the data provided in the study report.