"JohnT" wrote in message
...

Why? Travelling by air, even taking into account the fact that
occasionally
really nasty things happen, is 99.99 per cent safe.

Very few people would make air trips if flying were that unsafe. There
would be a crash about once a day in the USA.

Guesstimate that each of the top 25 airports in the USA have an average of
300 departures per day (some have much more). That makes vaguely 7500
departures per day, just counting the major airports. JohnT threw out the
number of one problem per ten thousand flights. That would mean roughly one
airliner crash per day in the USA. There have been about 1000 days since
"9/11". IIRC, it has been a number of years since a mainline US airliner
crash.

Even on the disastrous day of 9/11, if you had a scheduled departure from
any US airport chosen at random between 7 and 10 am, the chance of being on
one of the crashed airliners was probably not more than one in a thousand -
and that is the ONLY "bad" day on record.

The historical incidence of crashes is around one in a million takeoffs for
reputable airlines, not one in ten thousand. Is your likelihood of dying
tomorrow from other causes as low as one in a million? People only live
about 25,000 - 30,000 days.