It is a normal human response for us to see disaster or danger somewhere and avoid that area like a plague. Of course, what we fail to compute, is that there are a hundred other things that we do daily that are equally, if not more, dangerous than hopping on a plane.
While it is unquestionable that the tragedy of a massive loss of life in a plane crash is terrible, the statistical probability that this will happen to you, is not really affected by a few crashes. This may sound cold and harsh, especially in light of the immense tragedy of flight MH17 and the other two plane crashes in less than a week, but statistics don’t grieve.
The occasional rash of disasters like the recent ones don’t help matters any. But the fact is, those are just statistical clusters — the airline equivalent of a few people in one country developing a rare form of cancer, which gets people looking for an environmental toxin or some other cause, when in fact it may just be random numbers at play. Yes, flying into a war zone or the teeth of a typhoon is going to increase the danger that something very bad is going to happen to you. But avoid those obvious no-go zones and the odds are very good you’ll be just fine.
In 2010, according to a report by the U.N.’s Civil Aviation Organization, there were a breathtaking 30,566,513 commercial departures worldwide. Yet, according to an authoritative site that tracks all departures and arrivals, there were only 12 crashes of planes carrying more than 18 people and only three of them resulted in more than 99 fatalities. Those deaths were an unspeakable tragedy for the people who lost their lives and the families they left behind, but in the cold calculus of probability, they’re less than a rounding error compared to all the people who flew aboard those 30.5 million flights.
While it doesn’t help that these disasters happen in clusters, we need simply remind our weary instincts that it is as dangerous speeding along the highway as it is getting onto a Malaysia Airlines plane – probably more so in fact.
Keep Calm And Fly On we say… just maybe not over the Ukraine and Russia for a while.
Check out more of the stats and why air travel is no more dangerous now that it ever has been at Time.
