THE DISSONANCE BETWEEN STATISTICS AND THE FEAR OF FLYING

ROSY STATISTICS VS FLYING PHOBIA

Call it pteromerhanophobia, aerophobia, aviatophobia, or aviophobia, but whatever the big term, it is the pure fear and anxiety about flying that grip us whenever there is a high-profile plane crash. Just as we are about to accept MH370's mysterious disappearance into the Indian Ocean last March, we now have to confront the utter destruction of MH17 by a missile in Eastern Ukraine 3 days ago!

The statisticians never stop to reassure us that it is plain silly to worry about plane crashes. If you are boarding a plane today, there is apparently only a 0.00001% chance that your plane will crash. Put, another way, plane crashes occur at the rate of one per 1.2 million flights.

If you take one flight a day, you would on average need to fly every day for 10,000 years before being involved in a fatal crash! Dying in a plane crash is a 1 in an 11 million lottery because even if involved in a crash, 95.7% of passengers survive! It has even been suggested that it is far more likely to die in the taxi that is bringing you to the airport as your chance of dying in a car crash is much higher at 1 in 5,000!

RATIONALITY VS EMOTIONALISM

Yet, 40 percent of plane passengers will experience some  kind of fear at one time or another while flying. Are these 40% silly? Why are the above rosy statistics not comforting enough for so many people?

I think the reason is not that these people are irrational. People are fearful not because plane crashes are statistically frequent but because of the very fact that they occur at all. In fact, unlike statisticians,  people have very different ideas of what "rare" and "frequent" means.

For example, in 2013, there were 12 commercial air crashes killing a total of 185 people. And so far in 2014, it had been even more deadly, killing 555 in 4 incidents.

So, in the last 18 months, 740 people had perished while on board a commercial plane, working out to roughly 1.37 deaths every day since January 2013. Each of these 740 people must have thought that their chance of dying was a minuscule  1 in 11 million, but yet it happened ...

According to data from Bureau of Aircraft Accidents Archives, if we look at all aircrafts (not just commercial jets), there were 138 plane crashes in 2013 (462 deaths), and 155 in 2012. These average out to 11.5 crashes a month in 2013 and 12.9 a month in 2012; or about 1 crash every 2 and a half days over those 2 years. So, plane crashes  are not "rare" events.

MISSILE VS PLANE

Now, this latest crash of MH17 on the 17 July 2014 has a different dimension because it was the result of a deliberate attack. In fact, MH17 was the 13th commercial plane to be attacked by gunfire or missile since 1980.

When passenger jets which typically travel at 800 km/hr are attacked by missiles, they are unable to defend themselves or take evasive action because a missile like the one fired from the Russian-made BUK-M2 system would be traveling at about 1,000 metres per second! That's why there was no chance of escape or survival.

CONCLUSION

Bearing all the above in mind, I ask: is the fear of flying justified? For myself, I try to avoid plane travel not because I disbelieve the statistics. I have complete faith in them, especially the part about 40% of all plane passengers having fear and anxiety. To me, having a 40% risk of worrying about my mortality is no way to live. This is just one statistic that is too high!