Flying After September 11, 2001
If I take the train to Seattle next week to give a scheduled fear of flying lecture, would I be hypocritical or merely prudent? Who among us has not felt more apprehensive about flying now that the unfathomable has happened? The horrifying thought of suicidal murderers taking over our plane had once been relegated to B movie plots.
Though aware of the necessary risk in flying, we never had reason to envision passenger jets transformed into missiles. Our naive illusions of domestic security have been shattered. Despite the belated focus on flight security, there is no truly plausible reassurance while we await the trajectory of current events. However, such wishful thinking aside, flying is probably much safer now than it was on 9/11/01.
We have good reason to expect future terrorist attacks, but domestic airliners are unlikely to be the preferred means of future attack when our society remains more vulnerable in so many other, less scrutinized ways. Most of us kept flying after sobering disasters due to malfunctioning rear stabilizers, broken jackscrews, electrical shorts in center fuel tanks, exploding oxygen canisters, wind shear, human error and even a suicidal pilot. Why? Are we foolhardy? No, we've decided that flying is an acceptable risk, well worth the trade-off for convenience and mobility, much like the other acceptable risks we take every day.
If risk assessment were truly actuarial, the 1 in 125 lifetime risk of fatality by motor vehicle accident would prompt most of us to stop driving immediately. The comparable risk per flight of 1 in 5-10 million is irrelevant when altitude forces us to give up the irrational illusions of control that allow us to drive daily.
Our cerebral cortex can rationally grasp the hard numbers about the safety of flying compared to the many other risks we take daily without blinking; but, our reptilian brain keeps replaying those horrific televised images and imagined last moments of lost control, trumping rational risk assessment. In this vicariously traumatized state, risks feel palpable, even likely. Like the childhood game of paper/rock/scissors: imagination beats rationality.
While we await some measure of reassurance from global efforts to thwart terrorism, we must assume that passage of time and repeated exposure to flying will reestablish our perception of relative safety. If you truly can't accept flying as an acceptable risk yet, don't fly now.
At least, decide that you're deferring a decision rather than saying, "I'll never fly again." If you are one of the 1 in 5 Americans who were afraid to fly before 9/11/01, you now have what feels like a compelling and unassailable "reason" to avoid flying. You must ask yourself whether you are emphasizing the risk of death as a rationalization for avoiding uncertainty, discomfort, worry, panic symptoms, or not feeling in control. For now, there is no reassurance.
Expect your fear, accept your fear, but deal with your fear. Your personal freedom and our collective freedom depend on it.
SS/11/2001
Unfounded Fear: Scared to Fly After 9/11?
Don't Reach for the Car Keys
Science News Online, Jan. 11, 2003
By Sid Perkins
Flying within the United States remains a much safer way to travel than driving, even when accounting for airline fatalities resulting from the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. According to a new analysis of transportation safety, the average nonstop flight in the United States spans roughly 1,150 kilometers, and the risk of death from driving that distance is about 65 times that from flying.
Most risk from air travel is associated with takeoffs and landings, says Michael Sivak, a psychologist at the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute in Ann Arbor. Worldwide, about 95 percent of airline fatalities between 1991 and 2001 occurred during those phases of flight, so the risk of flying doesn't depend for the most part on the distance traveled. Sivak and his institute colleague Michael J. Flannagan estimated the risk of air travel in the United States by analyzing data collected from 1992 through 2001.
During that period, the 10 largest U.S. air carriers' nonstop domestic flights (excluding commuter flights)transported more than 5.5 billion passengers. Of those travelers, 433 died, including the 232 passengers on the ill-fated 9/11 flights. Therefore, the researchers calculate that the risk of death for any particular passenger for each nonstop domestic flight was less than 1 in 10 million. That's about 1 fatality per 15 billion km traveled.
The researchers analyzed data from a 10-year period because the annual number of airline fatalities varies widely. There weren't any deaths on commercial flights within the United States in 1993, 1998, or 2002, says Paul Takemoto of the Federal Aviation Administration in Washington, D.C. Someone who was afraid to fly would probably drive to his or her U.S. destination via interstate highways, says Sivak. Unlike air travel, highway driving has its risk almost evenly distributed throughout the trip.
For the year 2000 (the most recent year for which detailed statistics are available) there were 1,511 driver fatalities involving cars, light trucks, vans, and sport utility vehicles on intercity stretches of interstate highways. Those vehicles tallied about 345 billion km on those roads that year, says Sivak. Therefore, the risk of death while driving long distances via interstate highways (the safest driving environment, the researchers note) was a little over 4 per billion for each kilometer traveled.
From the two risk estimates, the researchers calculated a parameter called the indifference distance, the distance for which the two modes of transportation are equally risky. For the new analysis, the indifference distance is about 18 km. In other words, driving on even the safest roads is riskier than flying any distance where commercial air travel is an option, says Sivak. He and Flannagan report their analysis in the January/February issue of American Scientist.
Earlier studies have also shown that the risk of injury or death when traveling significant distances is greater in a car than it is in an aircraft, says Roger Blackman, a psychologist at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia. "In fact, for most people, the most dangerous part of air travel is their trip by car to the airport," he notes.
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