Airplane Safety - Dave's Midwestern Ohio Memories

Series of Guest Blogs by an out-of-state Fish Report reader originally from this area about fond memories of growing up in Midwestern Ohio during the 50’s & 60’s

Airplane Safety

Last Wednesday as we were traveling to the airport for a flight to Florida, traffic was bad so our Lyft driver took a detour under a railroad viaduct that was the site of a 1987 airplane crash, Northwest flight 255. Coincidentally, that was the same morning as a Ukrainian plane was shot down by Iran's missile defense system on the heals of Iran firing over a dozen ballistic missiles at US airbases in Iraq. So needless to say, our 2 1/2 hour flight to Florida was a little nerve-racking. To make matters worse, we were even seated in an exit row as I like the extra leg room.

As usual, my wife and I held hands and prayed a silent act of contrition and Our Father on take-off. Fortunately, the prayers worked (as did the pilots, mechanics and flight attendants), since all went well and we arrived safely.

My nephew is a pilot so at Christmas, we had a chance to talk about his work and airline safety. He claimed airplanes are almost 100 times safer than automobiles. I looked it up and indeed with autos someone has a 1 in 114 chance of dying in a car crash sometime over your lifetime while the airline odds are 1 in 9821. One interesting note about the data, private planes are not nearly as safe as a commercial airliners and provide about the same probability as dying in an automobile. This chart shows the dramatic improvement in airplane fatality rates over the last 50 years.

This trend represents quite a safety improvement while during the same period, airline travel was increasing seven-fold. This map taken at mid-day really demonstrates the current state of airline travel.

Back to that Northwest flight 255 that crashed into the Detroit area viaduct in 1987, a four year old named Cecelia Cichan was the only survivor. She’s now 36 and has filmed this excerpt from a documentary about her life and others who have survived airplane crashes.

Regarding the Ukrainian plane, here’s a video of the Iranian missile taking it down. There were unfortunately no survivors.

Safe travels, Fish Report readers! Be careful driving to the airport!

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