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What are the odds of your plane crashing anyway?

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What are the odds of your plane crashing
What are the odds of your plane crashing? Pictured Wells Fargo executive, Jennifer Riordan who died on Soutwest Airlines after an engine blow out.
 What are the odds of your plane crashing
What are the odds of your plane crashing? Pictured Wells Fargo executive, Jennifer Riordan who died on Soutwest Airlines after an engine blow out.

What are the odds of your plane crashing? Tragedy, freak circumstances aside, ever evolving technology and safety standards means that flying will continue to be one of the safest pursuits one can ever undertake. 

By now the whole world has heard how Albuquerque, New Mexico banking executive, Jennifer Riordan came to die on Tuesday’s Southwest Airlines flight heading out of NYC’s La Guardia airport and bound for Dallas, Texas.

By any reasonable stretch, Riordan, 43, a mother of two and her fellow 149 plane traveler passengers (and crew) shouldn’t have never expected to met with disaster or death. And yet against all odds, an unexplained sudden engine blowout on the twin engine Boeing 737 led to one woman’s death. Which raises the question how or rather what were the odds that such an event could have ever happened in the first place?

During a press conference after the engine blowout which led to an emergency landing National Transportation Safety Board chairman Robert Sumwalt described Tuesday’s tragedy involving Riordan as being the first passenger fatality in a U.S. airline accident since 2009.

Let’s break that down: the odds of a plane crash are one for every 1.2 million flights, with odds of dying one in 11 million. Your chances of dying in a car or traffic accident are one in 5,000

Your odds on one particular betting game though, bet365 sign up offer are in fact quite higher than what you would expect to find at your local bookmaker. Of course the chance also exists you might not win but that probably won’t stop you from playing either. Which brings us back to even more compelling flying statistics:

What are the odds of your plane crashing
What are the odds of your plane crashing? Pictured app, “Am I Going Down?” designed for those with an irrational fear of flying…

Using recently released app “Am I Going Down?” one can even go so far as to calculate for odds of trouble by imputing three variables: the departure and arrival airports, the airline, and the type of plane used.

Simplistic assumptions aside, the app can make the following assessments:

‘Heathrow to Milan on a British Airways Airbus A319. That flight has a one-in-4.8m chance of crashing. Shortly after (he is) jetting from Heathrow to JFK on a Virgin-operated A330. Chance of crashing? One in 5.4m. That means that he could apparently expect to fly on the route for 14,716 years before plummeting into the Atlantic.’

About to give up flying? Unlikely. If anything you’re more likely to probably take up more flying with such odds in your favor. That though doesn’t change the calamity that Jennifer Riordan’s family are feeling.

Then again the odds were always in Riordan’s favor that she would end up arriving at her final destination in one piece. Research shows that flying is the safest mode of transport one can take with just 0.07 deaths per one billion passenger miles traveled. 

Which is why many of us will continue to fly the airways despite the tabloid’s ability to make any tragedy appear larger than life (it’s how we sell news…) and appearing as if it were a daily occurrence- which such things are in fact not. 

More stats: “In 2016, 325 people died in 19 airplane crashes worldwide. … Your chances of dying in a car or traffic accident are one in 5,000. Even if you‘re reading this on an airplane while you‘re rocketing toward the ground, your odds of surviving are quite good. Among passengers aboard crashed planes, 95.7 percent survive.”

The upshot? You’re living in a more safer ‘flying the skies world’ than you probably realize, where even if you are involved in an accident while on a plane, the odds are you’re more than very likely to survive. Tragedy and headlines aside don’t let that stop you from living your life and seeing the big world that we all share and live in ….

What are the odds of your plane crashing
What are the odds of your plane crashing: the odds are certainly in your favor of getting to your destination….
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