Air travel still safest form of travel

It’s true that flying is not without risk: flying several hundred people tens of thousands of feet above the earth at close to the speed of sound in an environment subject to turbulence and low temperatures (-55°C) in a pressurised aluminium tube packed with fuel and potential ignition sources simply cannot be without risk. Fortunately, thanks to the superhuman efforts of those working at the daily grind of commercial aviation, flying is remarkably safe.

The numerous crashes witnessed, be it the Dana, Sosoliso, Bellview, ADC, EAS, and many others around the globe make people to think twice about whether or not air travel is safe or not. The crashes increase the fear for people who are already afraid of flying and temporarily makes people who may not be phobic to be scared of flying. Nigeria witnessed her worst form of plane crashes between 2005 and 2012 where planes were falling off the sky, leading to passengers taking to road travel.

They could not be convinced that there was serious oversight on most of the planes and airlines in the country until the appointment of a former Director-General of Nigeria Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA), Dr. Harold Olusegun Demuren, who sanitised the system. His effort paid off, culminating in the country passing the United States Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Category One aviation status and other milestone achievements.

Notwithstanding the measures you put in, accidents still happen even in climes where you have serious oversight. So, why did so many people take to driving in the aftermath of 9/11? The answer lies in what psychologists call “the illusion of control”.

Let’s take the case of what happened in the United States in the aftermath of two aeroplanes colliding into the two towers of the World Trade Centre on 11 September 2001. Many Americans took to driving long distances instead of flying.

By far and away the most risky form of transport is by motorcycle, which is more than 3, 000 times more deadly than flying.

Travelling in a car or truck is about 100 times more dangerous, while taking the train is twice as deadly as flying. In 2001, there were 483 deaths among commercial airline passengers in the USA, about half of them on 9/11. Interestingly in 2002, there wasn’t a single one. And in 2003 and 2004 there were only 19 and11 fatalities respectively. This means that during these three years, a total of 30 airline passengers in America were killed in accidents. In the same period, however, 128,525 people died in US car accidents.

Out of that, close to 1600 deaths could have been avoided if people had flown instead of deciding to drive. The simple explanation is that, behind the wheel of your own automobile, it is natural to feel in control. Try telling drivers that they have no influence over the skills of other road users, the weather, the condition of the road, mechanical problems, or any other common causes of accidents – they will agree. But they still feel in control of their destiny when they drive. They can’t help it. Put them on a plane, and they think their life is in the hands of the airline pilot or, worse, a bunch of terrorists. In fact, in the case of the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, pilot suicide is also one of the theories being bandied around and that definitely adds to the illusion of control.

The media also plays a huge part in magnifying the illusion of control. Plane crashes are turned into video images of twisted wreckage and dead bodies, then beamed into every home on television screens, says an accident investigator. In a society with a free press and a great number of publications, the likelihood that bad things will happen can be overstated to the point where the public begins to think and act irrationally.

However, despite these highprofile disasters and the media coverage around them, last year was one of the industry’s safest. According to Flightglobal’s report, last year’s global fatal accident rate of one per 2.38 million flights makes 2014 the safest year ever, following one accident per 1.91 million flights in 2013, one per 2.37 million in 2012, one per 1.4 million in 2011 and one per 1.26 million in 2010.

The study stated that the images of the crash lead people to conclude that flying is risky. In case of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 there have been no images of the wreck till now, but there has been constant news coverage all over the world. What people don’t take into account is the fact that many aeroplanes make safe landing almost every minute. None of this makes for news, though. The thousands of airplanes, which arrive safely at their destination everyday hold no media interest. This isn’t news. So, even the most logical of us are led to believe that the chance of a passenger dying in an airplane accident is much, much higher than it really is.

Also, car crashes rarely get talked about. Car crashes, on the other hand, rarely make the headlines. Smaller-scale road accidents occur in large numbers with horrifying regularity, killing hundreds and thousands of people each year worldwide.

They also do not make headlines. And given that more air crashes make it to the news than car accidents, it is easier to recall air crashes and deem air travel to be riskier, but driving remains much more risky than flying.

Experts said, “Even in countries that have been targets of intensive terror campaigns, such as Israel, the weekly number of casualties almost never came close to the number of traffic deaths”. As another example, in the energy sector far more workers are killed mining than are killed operating nuclear power plants.

Yet because of the association of civilian nuclear power with nuclear weapons, and because of the stigmatisation of nuclear power generation from the 1960s onwards — amplified by accidents such as Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima and environmentalists’ media-savvy campaigns — many believe the opposite to be true.

In the same way that a handful of nuclear accidents had an outsize influence on the perception of nuclear energy’s safety, so the loss of flights MH370, MH17, AH5017 and QZ8501 have influenced how safe people perceive commercial aviation to be.

Aviation analyst, Francis Ayigbe observed, “The 2014 Malaysian disasters have twisted perceptions of airline safety”.

The subsequent loss of AirAsia flight QZ8501 in the last days of December will only have heightened those concerns. According to the Aviation Safety Network, of aircraft carrying more than 14 passengers and excluding sabotage, hijacking, and military accidents, in 2014 there were 20 crashes accounting for 692 fatalities — one of the lowest accident rates on record, even if the number of casualties is up on recent years, the highest since 2010.

So why do we think the opposite?

Roughly onethird of passengers are what the industry calls “nervous flyers”, which tend to assume the worst. The academics suggest that individuals either dampen or amplify risk signals.

Some find the thought of not being in control unnerving, others are content to trust the unknown strangers — pilots, controllers, dispatchers, loaders, fuellers, engineers, regulators — who make it possible. Trust issues induce negativity. The tone of postdisaster newspaper headlines, especially those in many tabloids, border on alarmist. Such hyperbole is also capable of influencing some people