I have an irrational phobia of flying, I know all the stats about how flying is safest way to travel. I was wondering if someone could explain the why though. I’m hoping that if I can better understand what makes it safe that maybe I won’t be afraid when I fly.
Edit: to everyone who has commented with either personal stories or directly answering the question I just want you to know you all have moved me to tears with your caring. If I could afford it I would award every comment with gold.
Edit2: wow way more comments and upvotes then I ever thought I’d get on Reddit. Thank you everyone. I’m gonna read them all this has actually genuinely helped.
In: 7227
Basically:
There’s not much to crash into or to be crashed into by.
Your greatest hazards are takeoff and landing and strong procedures and good maintenance eliminate much of that risk.
The planes are safety checked before every flight and rigorously maintained, while people drive around with headlights or brakes not working. Pilots are very highly trained and there are always two for commercial travel, if one passes out for example the other can take over, if someone passes out in a car nobody can really take over, especially if they are dead weight on the accelerator and steering wheel.
There are also fewer “drivers” in the sky, a trip from New York to LA, you will probably be in the vicinity of maybe a dozen planes or so, but they shouldn’t be close enough to see most of them. If you made the same drive you would pass thousands, or tens of thousand of cars, all with the possibility of a distracted or unsafe driver, unsafe car, changes in weather playing into it, animals on the road, etc.
I’m going to assume that you’re familiar with cars. Imagine that every single car driver was a professional who went through years of training and had to be periodically tested through their entire career to prove they knew how to drive. And the cars they drove had to be maintained to a very tightly controlled and monitored maintenance plan. And the car had to be designed to incorporate every known practical safety device. And a third party constantly monitored every car and explicitly gave them orders to keep them apart from each other and things they could hit and watched to make sure they did it.
And, on top of all that, imagine that every single time there was a car accident it got investigated by dedicated professionals and, as needed, the driver training, car design, maintenance plan, and controllers had all their procedures updated or fixed so that accident couldn’t happen again.
Then do that continuously for about 70 years. There would be surprisingly few ways left for you to have an accident.
Commercial aviation has had multiple years where there were *zero* fatalities around an entire country. Cars kill about 100 people a day in the US alone.
Edit: corrected that we’ve never had a year with every country at once having zero fatalities. Most countries individually have zero most years.
Rigorous maintenance standards: every commercial vehicle flying in the sky has a large team of specially trained mechanics regularly checking up on planes to do whatever they can to minimize the chance of a failure during operation. When a failure does occur, there’s usually at least one redundant system that can still maintain safe flight.
Also you don’t have a bunch of idiots who barely passed qualification tests flying right next to each other
Planes are over-engineered with redundancies, have multiple engines but can maneuver with just one, have heavily trained crew (again with redundancies of multiple pilots on crew), communication/direction with air traffic control, regular inspections of planes, government oversight of airlines
Lots and lots of rules and regulations made by governments and airlines and unions and manufacturers and everyone else involved.
Plane crashes are rare, but when they happen they are quite spectacular and newsworthy.
People are bad at judging odds, they may know that they are more likely to die in a car crash when driving than a plane crash when flying, but a picture of the burning piece of wreckage of a plane with luggage and body parts and shoes and some child’s singed teddy bear speak to a part of our monkey brains that mere math can never reach.
Airlines and airports and aircraft makers only make a profit as long as people believe that air travel is save.
As a car maker you can coldly calculate that a minor defect that will kill a few people is not worth the money it would cost to recall all your cars and that it is cheaper to compensate the victims afterwards.
The air travel industry doesn’t have that luxury. Every picture of a crashed plane on the news does not just represent the loss of an expensive plane and claims by the families of anyone on board but it also represents a large number of people who decide against flying.
Since air crashes can be so spectacular and big news politicians also can get popularity by saying they will do something against what caused them.
Nobody is concerned by the usual economic and ideological arguments against safety restrictions and regulations when it comes to air-safety.
This way quite a lot of regulations and rules have been created over the decades.
Usually the new rules come from looking into what caused an incident in the past and finding out a way to prevent it from happening again.
If we treated other modes of transportation like that they would be much safer too.
If we would ban drivers from ever driving a car again for simple things like not everyone in the car wearing a seat belt if they roll out of the driveway and made sure all cars had redundant everything and pulled no longer safe cars out of circulation and spend tons of money on ensuring that roads and other infrastructure were well maintained and closed roads when the weather got bad and did a bunch of other things like that, cars would be much safer too.
We don’t, but we do air-travel and that makes it safe.
This woman explains it as ELI5 as it gets, I hope it helps you, it sure helped me: [here](https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMNjs9wpL/?k=1).
The only people allowed to fly commercial planes are highly-trained pilots. The only planes allowed to fly have to meet rigorous maintenance and inspection schedules. The only runways that are used are meticulously designed and maintained so that the flight paths make collisions nearly impossible, and there is a dedicated staff of air-traffic controllers assisting pilots to organize takeoffs and landings.
None of this is true for cars. Car accidents are almost always caused by driver error, followed by issues with the vehicles themselves and sometimes the road itself.
Bottom line, airline pilots are unbelievably overqualified for the job because safety is a top priority, while many drivers are on the road who are not qualified, because there is little that can be done within our current framework to prevent underqualified drivers from being on the road.
I think a big part of the fear of flying is a lack of control. You’re putting yourself in the pilots hands. Whereas if you’re driving a car yourself, it is easier to slow down or pull off of the road if you ever get scared or uncomfortable. I have a moderate fear of flying, and this is really what it boils down to for me: not feeling in control.
Hi, I worked in aircraft software development testing for many years. I can tell you that it is so safe because it’s a well enforced law. Aircraft are highly regulated, everything that goes into them must be much safer than car components and this is constantly being checked by FAA regulators for compliance. When there are crashes in the past, each is carefully investigated for cause and changes required to prevent that problem.
When there are big failures, it is often because a large company got around FAA regulation with political or legal pressure.
If automobiles were similarly regulated, roads would be vastly safer but it would be more expensive and people would have less freedom to speed, drive erratically or work on their own cars without oversight.
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