Frequent flyers don’t worry
Relax, nail biting, sedatives that make frequent flyers pop. Traveling on regular US airlines is safer than ever, with no fatalities in 2002 and just one death in 32.6 million passenger departures in 2003, according to the National Transportation Safety Board, a nearly independent agency. which examines why planes crash and what happens when they do. And even if your plane does go down, the chances of it getting away from the wreckage have improved considerably in recent years.
“There hasn’t been a major accident, knock on wood, in almost two years,” said Doug Wills, a spokesman for the Air Transport Association, a trade group for 24 airlines. In fact, in the last five years, the number of commercial airline accidents worldwide has dropped from 1.19 to 0.8 per million departures, according to statistics compiled by Boeing. The last air disaster in the United States occurred in January 2003 when an Air Midwest Beech 1900 crashed on takeoff from Charlotte-Douglas International Airport in North Carolina due to an unbalanced load. All 19 passengers and 2 crew members were killed. But in a more typical accident, 134 of the 145 passengers and crew survived when an American Airlines MD-80 crashed in a thunderstorm in Little Rock, Arkansas, five years ago, said Tony Broderick, an aviation consultant and former civil servant. security of the Federal Aviation Administration.
“Air travelers tend to believe that if they have an accident, they are not going to survive,” said Nora Marshall, chief of the survival factors division of the safety board at the Office of Aviation Safety, which analyzes the causes of injuries. and deaths. . “That’s not true. In a study of 568 accidents between 1983 and 2000 involving scheduled passenger flights on US airlines, 95 percent of the passengers survived.” And living through an accident isn’t a ticket to eternal trauma, either, according to a 1999 American Psychological Association study. In the long run, accident survivors who are willing to share their experience (many aren’t) suffer less emotionally. . distress and have higher self-esteem than travelers who have never had an accident.
One reason for the improved safety record is the increased training crew members receive to efficiently extricate passengers from a downed aircraft. JetBlue cabin attendants take a refresher course on crash procedures once a year on their employment anniversary, for example, working on a mock-up plane at the airline’s headquarters in Queens, not far from the airports. Guard and Kennedy. Aircraft are also becoming more resistant to one of the leading causes of injury and death: fire and smoke. According to safety regulations established in the late 1980s, cabins on new aircraft and on older models being refurbished must include fire-resistant seat cushions, escape route lighting to exits, fire extinguishers in the kitchens and smoke detectors in the bathrooms.
Travelers often ask which plane is the safest. But an examination of plane crashes doesn’t provide an answer, aviation experts say. The statistical record depends in part on the service life of the aircraft; the Boeing 777, for example, has not had a major accident but has been in service for only 10 years. The now-retired Concorde was a “safe” plane without any major accidents from its debut in the 1970s until the Air France crash at Charles de Gaulle airport in 2000. What about 9/11? Hasn’t terrorism made flying more dangerous? That may be so, but it also resulted in the largest security crackdown in American aviation history. “By the time you get to your seat in the cabin of an airplane, you’ve already gone through several layers of security,” said Alison Duquette, a spokeswoman for the FAA. “And there’s another layer on board: the armored cabin door.”