July 6, 2009
Good news for flying-phobes
It’s often said that flying is one of the safest ways to travel, and the numbers bear it out. According to the most recent statistics from the International Air Transport Association, there were only 0.13 fatalities per million airplane passengers last year.
That means air travel was about eight times safer than the one-in-a-million standard often used to count something as extremely unlikely. Here’s a chart showing activities that increase your annual death risk by one micromort (great word!)—the unit for a one-in-a-million probability of dying. It turns out that flying 1,000 miles in a jet carries about the same negligible risk as having one chest x-ray, or traveling 10 miles by bicycle, or breathing Boston air for two days.
I know, statistics aren’t always much help when it comes to fear of flying. But at least the numbers are on your side.
Just a few years ago, it was one crash in a million flights. So one in eight million is quite an improvement. Problem is, statistics don’t make fearful fliers feel a bit better. The problem is simple: both of those ratios include “one”, and that is the one that crashes.
The key to fixing fear of flying is to train the mind to not react when that thought of the “one” comes to mind, nor react when a though of how that “one” crashes comes to mind, nor what it would feel like to be on that plane.
When the brain’s response to those thoughts is controlled, it is a lot easier for the fearful flier to recognize that what is feared and what is really going on during the flight are two different things.
I’ve published some articles on beating fear of flying in a library at http://www.fearofflying.com/wordpress based on almost thirty years of specializing in treating this problem, both as an airline captain and as a licensed therapist.
Comment by Capt Tom Bunn LCSW — July 6, 2009 @ 5:11 pm
[...] in three million is about one death for every 62,500 jumps. Not quite as good as the 2008 rate of one airline passenger death for every eight million airplane passengers who flew that year. But we’d all agree that skydiving may always be a little riskier than [...]
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