Structural crashworthiness design is a critical aspect of aircraft development to meet safety and certification requirements. Previous studies highlight that crashworthiness should already be considered in early design stages to guide concept selection and structural sizing. Due to the complex structural response of the fuselage under crash loads, a purely simulative approach is not meaningful and experimental fuselage barrel drop testing is necessary for model validation. Yet, full-scale crash tests of aircraft structures remain costly and time-consuming, requiring substantial effort for manufacturing, logistics, instrumentation, and test execution. Scaled testing therefore provides a route to reduce cost and effort while retaining meaningful information on deformation and energy-absorption mechanisms, provided that similarity principles are applied consistently. Although similitude and scaling concepts have been extensively studied in the context of ship collisions, aircraft ditching, and building explosions, comparatively few investigations address aircraft crashworthiness using scaled structural models. Scaled models are often used to validate numerical models, this approach is applied to crash-relevant structural models of aircraft parts. Scaled fuselage segments are manufactured by selective laser sintering (SLS) and investigated under quasi-static and short-term dynamic loading conditions. In parallel, finite element (FE) models are developed to reproduce the dominant deformation and failure mechanisms. Model validation is performed using corresponding experimental tests with focus on global force–displacement response and absorbed energy, complemented by comparisons of deformation patterns and dominant failure modes. A central focus is the stiffness-consistent design of the scaled structure. Key geometric parameters—most notably the cross-sectional properties of frame segments—are systematically adjusted to achieve similarity of structural stiffness and representative load paths with respect to full-scale aircraft structures. The validated FE models are then used to quantify the sensitivity of crash response to geometric scaling choices and to identify geometric drivers for energy absorption and failure initiation, enabling a test–simulate–optimize loop for scaled crash structures.