Worried about flying after the last week? Don’t be.
The chances of dying in a plane crash are equivalent to being struck by lightning seven times — at least if flying in the U.S., insists one aviation expert.
“We had a really terrible week,” Phil Derner Jr., founder and president of NYCAviation, reflected to the Daily News on the likely loss of more than 400 lives after three major plane crashes overseas in one week.
But as far as reason for alarm, Derner, whose website is credited with providing worldwide aerospace news and consulting, assures that aviation safety is only improving, especially when it comes to flying stateside.
“I find that in some parts of the world, huge crashes happen and kind of go unnoticed,” he said. “It’s a little more visible because of the higher profile ones.”
Globally, in 2013 there were 210 deaths from commercial aviation accidents, according to the latest report by the International Air Transpiration Association (IATA), a trade association whose airlines comprise of 84% of the total air traffic.
The year before there were 414 deaths while the five-year average was 517.
Judging by those statistics, 2014 would appear to be heading toward a particularly gruesome headcount thanks to these last few days.
“It’s just an unfortunate coincidence,” Derner said of the airline crashes in Ukraine, Africa and Taiwan — one of which is believed to have been intentionally shot down; another as of Thursday afternoon has yet to be confirmed as found.
He instead argued the global statistics as affected by countries with safety and technology resources that are inferior to what is available in the U.S.
“The U.S. and Europe are just on another level of safety which is amazing,” he said. “In the U.S. in the last decade there have been a total of five billion passengers. And the death total for all of those people was like 91. So it depends on where you are and I don’t mean to say that other areas aren’t safe but … those statistics don’t really apply to those worldwide deaths.”
To those curious, where you are in some cases may also include where your seat is.
Asked about the safest seats in a plane, Derner credited the rear seats as providing the strongest, structural support, if experiencing a collision.
As far as most comfortable, he suggests sitting over the wings, especially those prone to air sickness.
When it comes to the most common kinds of aviation accidents, statistically the most prominent are during runaway takeoffs or landings, accounting for 23% of all accidents over the past five years, according to the IATA report.
Loss of control in-flight almost always proves to be fatal, with 95% of incidents over the last five years involving fatalities to passengers or crew. Over the last five years 10% of accidents were reportedly due to this.
The least common accidents are those where an aircraft is unintentionally flown into some kind of terrain during the approach and landing phase of flight. There were six in 2013, according to IATA.
