Milestone 3

  

Traveling By Flight

Is it safe to fly?

YES!

Here's why:

But what about terrorism? What about the incidents that pop up on the nightly news? Perhaps flying used to be safe, but not anymore... right?

Wrong. We are safer now than we have been, safer than we've ever been!

But what about the amount of incidents? Surely, if you add up all the flight incidents that cause people such fear, you'll find that there are so many flights, right?

Again, wrong! Look as hard as you can, but you won't find a lick of blue! Because there are so many incidents that happen by car, in comparison, you won't find any of airplanes.

Now how about fatalities? Suppose an incident happens, how likely are you to die from the incident? It's easy to guess that because airplanes are high up in the air, that deaths would swap and that fatalities by air would be much higher. Instead, this tells another story.

The facts are clear. If you're going to be in an accident, you better hope that you're in an airplane! Luckily for you, the chances of you getting in a fatal accident or even getting into an incident by plane is right next to 0%! For now, let's talk about the SAFEST airlines! For the period of 2000 to 2014, the top five safest airlines by incident rates are:

All of these airlines are tied at one. Something that is important to see on the chart is that this pie chart only includes airlines with any incidents. There are many airlines without a single incident over the entire fifteen year period. These airlines include: Aer Lingus, Avianca, Condor, COPA, Finnair, Japan Airlines, LAN Airlines, TAP - Air Portugal and Virgin Atlantic.

Aside from all of this, there's the concern that if an incident did occur that a fatal accident is likely to occur. To disprove this, all of the fatal accidents were shown by airline. There were only four airlines that resulted with a combined fatal accident rate of less than ten.

So to summarize, there is one final chart to succinctly describe the levels. As seen in the following chart, not only are incidents and accidents rare, but they're becoming rarer and even during these turbulent times, there's nothing that indicates that these numbers will rise again and pose any safety risks.

So sail the skies, passengers - and don't forget to fasten your seatbelts!