Human beings have a difficult time comprehending very large or very small numbers. In fact, many folks have a hard time thinking about numbers at all! But the statistics, percentages, facts, and figures involving the aviation industry are fascinating, and they help put the whole experience of commercial flight into perspective.
For instance, imagine a sports stadium filled with 45,000 people watching a game. That’s not too difficult to see in the mind’s eye, right? Now imagine forty of these stadiums. Most people find this harder to picture, so try pretending you’re floating in a balloon over an array four stadiums wide and ten stadiums long. That’s a lot of people. In fact, that’s about the number of people who fly each day on American-based airlines: about 18 million.
Who Is Flying?
About 665 million passengers fly on American-based airlines each year—
14,500 sports stadiums’ worth. Include the rest of the world, and the number jumps to about 1.6 billion passengers each year. That breaks down to about 4.25 million people (approximately the entire population of Norway) getting on airplanes every day of the year.
New Scientist magazine figured that given the total number
of people flying each day and the average distance flown per flight (around 1,100 miles, or 1,750 km), there are about 366,144 people in the air at any given time. While that’s the
equivalent to the population of a medium-sized city, it’s only about .0061 percent of the world population. Of course, in reality the number of people fluctuates greatly depending on the time of day, day of the week, and week of the year.
Airplane travel is
nature ’ s way of making you
look like your passport photo.
— Former vice president
Albert Gore
According to the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), in the year 2000 U.S.-based commercial airlines alone flew a total of 11,022,759 flights, covering 7,148,928,000 miles in 17,474,405 flight hours. That’s equivalent to 13,000 round-trip voyages to the Moon.
How Safe Is Flying?
Thinking about extremely small figures can be just as mind-numbing as trying to comprehend the very large ones above. For example, one way to reckon airline safety is by the percentage of airplane flights that crash with at least one fatality. What if air travel were 99.99 percent safe? That would result in three fatal air crashes every day of the year. In fact, air travel is approximately 99.9999996 percent safe. That means only about .0000004 percent of airplanes crash.
But that number is simply too small to be meaningful for most people. Instead, they just think,
“Well, it seems like I hear about a lot of disasters.”
Let’s look at some real safety numbers:
● More people die in car crashes in the United States in six months than have died in all the airplane accidents worldwide in the last 100 years.
● If air travel were as safe as driving in a car, a jet aircraft carrying 120 people would crash without survivors every day of the year.
● Of the approximately 2.5 million Americans who died in 1998, more than 700,000 died of heart disease, some 500,000 died from cancer, at least 50,000 died from medical mistakes in hospitals, and more than 20,000 died in car crashes. But not a single passenger died from U.S.-based airliners crashing. Even in 1994, a year with a higher- than-average number of disasters, only 239 people died.
● The Bureau of Travel Statistics reports that in 1995 (the most current information available) Americans took approximately 505 million automobile trips of 100 miles or more, and about 22,000 car passengers died. That same year, U.S. air carriers flew about 8.1 million flights, and there were two crashes in which 166 people died. If the average car had 2 people and the average flight had 150 people, there were 22
fatalities per million automobile trips and only .14 fatalities per million air trips—air travel was 157 times safer than driving.
● Because people generally drive much more than they fly, let’s look at the relative safety of cars and airplanes based on the distance they travel rather than the number of trips.
The U.S. National Safety Council calculates that between 1993 and 1999, passengers were thirty-seven times more likely to die in a car crash than on a commercial flight.
Using more conservative crash data, the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics
calculated the number of fatalities per 100 million miles of long-distance travel: 9.3 for
cars, 5 for trains, and 1.22 for commercial airlines. Here, flying is almost eight times safer than driving, and almost twice as safe as taking the train.
Those of us who have been around safety statistics long enough eventually get to the point where we are more nervous driving to the airport, and then when we get there and take our seat on the airplane we relax and feel more secure.
— Norman Mineta, U.S. secretary of transportation
According to a study by Arnold Barnett and Alexander Wang of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the odds of dying in an airplane crash vary slightly depending on whether you’re on an international or domestic flight, and whether the airline is from an industrial or
developing nation. For domestic flights on an industrial nation’s airline, the odds of dying are about one in 8 million (you have a better chance at winning many state lotteries). Small commuter airplanes in the United States fare slightly worse: The odds are about one in 2 million.
According to the Air Transportation Association, 26 percent of Americans took at least one airplane flight in 1978. By 1997, the numbers had swelled to 48 percent. The U.S. Bureau of Travel Statistics reports that one out of six adults in the United States has never flown on a commercial airline.
The odds of your flight crashing are always the same, no matter how often you fly. However, the more frequently you fly, the higher the chance you will someday crash (just like the more lottery tickets you buy, the more likely you are to win). Fortunately for frequent flyers, the difference is incredibly small. If 1,000 people flew every day for thirty years, only one of them would likely crash.
For international flights, the odds of a fatality drop to one in 5 million—curiously, this figure is about the same whether it’s an industrial or developing nation’s airline. Finally, domestic
flights on developing nations’ jet airlines have the highest fatality odds of all: one in 500,000.
That sounds bad, but one in 500,000 is like saying “one day out of 1,300 years.”
Vast Quantities
The infrastructure necessary to maintain millions of flights each week is staggering. For instance, Delta Airlines (the third largest airline in the United States) sells approximately
316,000 airline tickets each day for its 2,660 daily flights (that’s 3 tickets every second and an airplane departure every thirty-two seconds around the clock). Each day, Delta flights burn about 7.5 million gallons of jet fuel and carry about 2,333 tons of mail. To keep the
passengers happy, flight attendants on this airline alone serve 164,400 meals or snacks, 461,000 soft drinks, and 225,500 cups of coffee (give or take a few).
So the next time you’re on a flight, munching happily on your pretzels or nuts, consider the numbers, the odds, and the percentages…and as your mind begins to boggle, sit back and smile, knowing that you’re not alone and you’re very safe.
According to the National Safety Council, more Americans die each year by drowning in their bathtubs, falling from ladders, or freezing to death than by flying on commercial airlines.