The Norm Chronicles by Blastland Michael & Spiegelhalter David

Author:Blastland, Michael & Spiegelhalter, David [Blastland, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9780465085699
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2014-06-02T16:00:00+00:00

FLYING

“The pilot has advised that there is some turbulence ahead. Please return to your seats and fasten your belts.”

As the plane bucks around, the wings flap up and down, babies cry, and the knuckles turn white, is there anyone who remains completely calm, except those who are drunk, drugged, asleep, or all three?

Fear of flying, or aerophobia, is common. Around 3 to 5 percent of the population just won’t fly, around 17 percent admit to being “afraid of flying,” and 30 to 40 percent have moderate anxiety.18 We have known risk professionals—archetypes of rationality—who refuse to fly.

It is a treatable condition, and British Airways runs day courses for around £250 that conclude with a 45-minute flight.19 Sadly they do not publish their success rates, or the counts of those carried gibbering from the plane.

Again, of all the classic fear factors, it is the feeling of complete lack of control over our fate that kicks in hardest when strapped in a plane with the ground a long way off. Perhaps a lack of understanding also contributes—how does it stay up anyway? If we all stopped believing, would it fall from the sky?

And we’ve seen how the easy availability of negative images influences our perception, and the media certainly like to linger on pictures of wrecked planes. Those of a certain age bring to mind examples from history, from Buddy Holly to the Manchester United soccer team.

But for real aero-disaster porn nothing can beat the unsubtly named Plane Crash Info website, which keeps a running database of all fatal crashes involving commercial airlines, together with lurid photographs and even audio clips from the black box recorders—which are disturbing, to put it mildly. In 2011 it recorded 44 crashes, around 1 a week. Sounds bad, but it’s an improvement on 70 in 2001 (including, of course, 4 on 9/11).20

Their analysis, vividly illustrated in Figure 19, shows that the cruising part of the flight is by far the safest, taking the most time and resulting in the fewest accidents. Per minute, take-off and landing are around 60 times as dangerous as the middle of the flight. Try muttering this mantra during turbulence.

Plane Crash Info also estimates that human error accounts for over half the accidents—though whether it’s pilot error or mechanical failure, there is still nothing you can do about it.

But perhaps you can do something about which airline you fly on: Plane Crash Info estimates that, in the safest 30 airlines, there is a fatal accident, on average, every 11 million flights, and since there is some chance of surviving, the odds of being killed are around 1 in 29 million per flight. In contrast, for the bottom 25 airlines, there is around 10 times the rate of fatal accidents, and your chance of being killed on a flight is about 20 times higher.

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