Airline Safety?

The other day, I saw something that estimated there were 60 million commercial flights in the US last year. That's a six, and then seven zeros. Big number. Now, do you know how many of these commercial airplanes crashed and killed everyone on board last year? You probably already know the answer - zero. Not one single one - and, you know you'd have heard about it if it happened. That's a pretty darn good rate, imho.

Now, that got me thinking about condoms. Sure, you probably don't see the correlation, but bear with me for a second - you know condoms are basically 97% effective, right? Most of us would take a 97% chance on many things - if I had a 97% chance of winning the lottery, I'd play. A 97% shot of making an onside kick? I'm kicking it. 97% is pretty darn good - I'd take a goaltender with a 97% save percentage any day. But I took that number and applied it to commercial flying - a 3% "failure" rate in commercial flying would mean 1.8 million (1,800,000) planes going down each year. Would that be acceptable?

Uh, no.

Not even close.

OK, what about 99% success? Well, that's still 600,000 planes going down. In fact, if I drop it all the way down to 0.001% failure rate, that still means 600 planes going down each year. Would you fly if 600 commercial planes had crashed last year? I wouldn't! All the way down to 0.00001% failure rate still means 6 planes going down - I'm still iffy at 6 planes!

So, I'd have to go all the way down to 0.0000017% to get just one plane going down. That is a 99.9999983% success rate. Wow, are we demanding!

I think it's safe to fly. I'm not currently planning on looking at statistics on driving, because I might never drive again.

Incidents grouped by year: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incidents_on_commercial_airliners_grouped_by_year