Statistically speaking, air travel is far safer than riding in a car. According to statistics professor Arnold Barnett, Ph.D., you could fly an average of once every single day for a period of 4 million years before dying in a fatal airplane crash. (Goodman, 2022) With your odds of dying in a car accident 1 in under a thousand, this makes hopping on a commercial airplane far, far safer then driving to the supermarket.
That said, there’s just something about the thought of plummeting to your death inside a metal box from high altitudes that makes air travel especially terrifying to some people. Although they aren’t common, airplane crashes and accidents do happen, and when they do, it’s all over the news. This gives people a somewhat lopsided perception of how dangerous flying truly is.
Information on air-travel safety and airplane accidents
This area explores some of the nuances of air safety, with stories and statistics of how airplane accidents happen.
References:
Goodman, E. (2022) “High-flying facts about air travel,” Readers Digest, Oct., pp. 24-26