No cause for panic

Don’t worry. It won’t happen again. The Spanish air crash that killed 153 people of the 172 on board the Spanair MD82 at Barajas airport, Madrid, won’t be repeated. Statistics suggest that anything like it simply won’t happen again in the near future. Just to prove me and the statisticians wrong it probably will. But realistically it won’t. Flying remains by far the safest form of transport. If you travel by air for a lifetime you have a 1 in 2.5 million chance of being killed. Use the train and that drops to 1 in a 50,000 chance. On the road that becomes a 1 in 200 chance… Last year 2,943 people died on the road. An air crash, by the nature of its size and rarity, always attracts more publicity — and far more fear — than road casualties.

We keep aircraft at least a mile apart. We train pilots and crew in what to do in an emergency. And every time we get on an aircraft we are told where the lifejacket is, what to do if we crash in water, where the exits are and a host of other pre-flight paraphernalia. Why is flying safer than it was? Largely it is because technology has advanced… Gone are the days when the aircraft was the weakest link in the chain… Today, the pilot is the weakest link. More than three quarters of the accidents that do happen occur because the pilot and crew are to blame… Perhaps two or three things went wrong with the aircraft at once — a rare but possible explanation for the Spanair MD82 crash. Does that make you feel better? Somehow I knew it wouldn’t.

Excerpted from a comment by Harvey Elliott in ‘The Times’