Safety is a concern of everyone who flies or contemplates it. I can provide you with volumes of information about the attention to safety given by the airline industry. No other form of transportation is as scrutinized, investigated and monitored as commercial aviation.
Yet if you decide to hold onto the belief that flying is dangerous, then these reassuring safety facts are lost to you. Statistics and figures that prove airline transportation to be the safest way to travel relate to our logical, reasoning, rational mind. Most passengers who have knowledge of the commercial airline industry believe that flying is safe. But when something occurs that we don’t understand, any of us can become quickly frightened. That’s why I encourage you to study as much as you need to reassure yourself about the industry and to take some of the mystery out of commercial flight.
However, some small thing may occur on one of your flights that you haven’t studied. If you become startled or frightened at that time, the statistics that I am about to present may come in handy. An airline accident is so rare, when some unfamiliar noise or bump occurs, your response need not be, “Oh, no! What’s wrong?!” Instead, it can be something like, “I’m not sure what that sound was, but there’s nothing to worry about.” Feel free to press your overhead call button to page a flight attendant whenever you want to ask about unfamiliar sights or sounds. But you needn’t jump to fearful conclusions.
Dr. Arnold Barnett, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has done extensive research in the field of commercial flight safety. He found that over the fifteen years between 1975 and 1994, the death risk per flight was one in seven million. This statistic is the probability that someone who randomly selected one of the airline’s flights over the 19-year study period would be killed in route. That means that any time you board a flight on a major carrier in this country, your chance of being in a fatal accident is one in seven million. It doesn’t matter whether you fly once every three years or every day of the year.
In fact, based on this incredible safety record, if you did fly every day of your life, probability indicates that it would take you nineteen thousand years before you would succumb to a fatal accident.
Perhaps you have occasionally taken the train for your travels, believing that it would be safer. Think again. Based on train accidents over the past twenty years, your chances of dying on a transcontinental train journey are one in a million. Those are great odds, mind you. But flying coast-to-coast is ten times safer than making the trip by train.
How about driving, our typical form of transportation? There are approximately one hundred and thirty people killed daily in auto accidents. That’s every day—yesterday, today and tomorrow. And that’s forty-seven thousand killed per year.