Here’s an excerpt from an article by Andrew Weir entitled Flight into Danger, 8/7/99, from New Scientist magazine.

So you think a jet plane is the safest way to get where you want to go? It ain’t necessarily so, argues Andrew Weir.

It’s that time of year again-the season of mile-long check-in queues, mysteriously delayed takeoffs and wandering luggage. Every day, all over the world, tens of millions of us will be joining those queues.

So many passengers, so many planes. And with air travel growing by about 7 per cent every year, more are on the way. No wonder airports are barely able to keep up. But at least we can take some comfort from the airlines’ assurances that the commercial jet is the safest form of transport ever invented, that flying is as safe as technology can make it and getting ever safer. Can’t we?

Unfortunately, few things in life are what they seem – and this is definitely the case with air travel. All right, so we may need some reassurance when we are stuck in a cramped aluminium tube surging at 900 kilometres per hour, 10 kilometres above Earth. But while working on a TV documentary series on air crashes and researching my book, I discovered that the reassurances we’re given are about as scientific as a belief in the curative powers of a rabbit’s foot. Take the claims about flying being the safest form of transport. If you plot the number of fatal accidents against distance travelled, you end up with 0.03 deaths per 100 million kilometres for commercial aircraft versus 0.1 deaths per 100 million kilometres for rail travel.

What the airlines don’t tell you is that this form of comparison effectively dilutes the accident rate for aircraft. Aircraft usually travel huge distances while cars and trains don’t. And while the risk of having a fatal accident in a car or train is spread more or less evenly across the journey time, the opposite is true for planes: 70 per cent of all aircraft accidents take place at takeoff and landing, which is only 4 per cent of journey time.

A better measure is to plot the number of deaths against the time travelled. This is fairer, since many car and train journeys last as long as plane journeys. But it still doesn’t take into account the concentration of accidents around takeoff and landing.

The most accurate method is to compare the number of deaths with the number of journeys made. So accurate, in fact, that this is the measure used by the industry and its insurers. This makes much more sense, because what matters to the individual is the journey, not how long it took or how far it went. Also, it enables comparison of different types of jet, both long haul and short haul.

By this measure, air travel takes on a rather different complexion. Deaths per 100 million passenger journeys are, on average, 55 for airliners compared with 4.5 for cars, and 2.7 for trains. Only motorbikes, at 100 deaths per 100 million passenger journeys, are more risky than aircraft on this basis.

Andrew Weir’s is the author of the book The Tombstone Imperative-The Truth About Air Safety available at the Amazon.co.uk.

Tags: accident, air safety, Air Travel, aircraft, crash, death, disaster, flights, jet, journey, passengers, planes, Statistics, Stats