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Some Statistics
How safe is air travel?
Commercial jet aviation is an exceptionally safe way to get from
here to there. More than three million people around the world
fly safely on commercial aircraft every day. In 1998, the world's
commercial jet airlines carried approximately 1.3 billion people
on 18 million flights while suffering only 10 fatal accidents.
How often do serious accidents happen?
They're exceedingly rare. The risk of being involved in a commercial
jet aircraft accident where there are multiple fatalities is approximately
one in three million. To put this in perspective, you'd have to
fly once every day for more than 8,200 years to accumulate three
million flights. But even though fatal jet accidents are rare,
the aviation community world-wide is continuing to work together
to reduce them.
So is flying getting safer or riskier?
Commercial aviation has always been the safest mode of long-distance
travel. But it's gotten even safer. Thirty years ago, fatal accidents
on commercial jetliners occurred approximately once in every 140
million miles flown. Today, it's 1.4 billion miles flown for every
fatal accident — a ten-fold safety improvement.
What's the risk of flying compared to driving?
In the United States, it's 22 times safer flying in a commercial
jet than traveling by car, according to a 1993-95 study by the
U.S. National Safety Council comparing accident fatalities per
million passenger-miles traveled. The number of U.S. highway deaths
in a typical six-month period — about 21,000 — roughly equals
all commercial jet fatalities worldwide since the dawn of jet
aviation four decades ago. In fact, fewer people have died in
commercial airplane accidents in America over the past 60 years
than are killed in U.S. auto accidents in a typical three-month
period.
What causes commercial jets to crash?
There's rarely a single cause. Usually it's a combination of things.
One reason accidents are so rare is that commercial aviation has
so many redundant, back-up systems to keep a problem from becoming
serious. Typically this means that before a problem escalates
into an accident, safety experts say, a series of increasingly
unlikely events must occur, one after another. It's sort of like
having all the holes line up in randomly selected, stacked slices
of Swiss cheese: perhaps not impossible, but the chances are extremely
remote. International teams are currently studying data in order
to identify the most significant accident causes, and, importantly,
strategies for preventing them.
What's the riskiest portion of a flight?
Takeoff and the climb to cruising altitude, and the descent and
landing of an airplane are the two most risk-prone periods of
a flight. In overly simplistic terms, takeoff demands the most
from an airplane in terms of engine thrust and structural integrity,
while final approach and landing demand the most of the cockpit
crew. About three-fourths of all serious accidents occur during
these two relatively brief phases of a flight.
Where's the safest seat on a jet during a crash?
There are some who believe it's safer to be seated near the wings
or in the rear of the cabin. However, there's no evidence that
any one part of an aircraft is safer than another. Also, it is
best to listen to the pre-take-off safety briefing on each flight,
as well as all in-flight announcements.
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