Despite the headlines air travel is safer than ever

[Hermit]

The old slogan about flying being safer than driving a car is actually cherry picking data.

If you calculate deaths per kilometer travelled, travelling by air is safer. But if you calculate it as deaths per hour travelling, then there are more deaths in aircraft.

Not to mention the time spent in airports due to your flight being cancelled/delayed/rescheduled.

Also, you need to book in a minimum of one hour before the departure of a domestic flight and two hours before an international one in Australia. Worse, after you land you wait a fortnight for your luggage to roll up on the conveyor belt. But wait. There's more. It takes only a few minutes for me to get to my local airport, but then there may be several hours between landing in Adelaide and getting a connecting flight to wherever it is I am going. Alternatively, I could drive to the Adelaide airport. That takes more than four hours.

All that said, air travel is still safer than going by road.

[JimC]

Part of the reason that I drive rather than fly is that I am in control, not some young whipper-snapper of a pilot...

[pErvinalia]

Fuck, that footage of that crash! Is that real or animation?

[mistermack]

It amazes me that in this day and age, it was still possible for the pilots of the Air France jet not to know that they had stalled, and that they were falling straight down.

I just invented a fail safe way of letting them know.
Have a lever that shoots out a nylon streamer, right in front of the cockpit window.
If it streams back towards you, you are still going forwards. If it points straight up, you need to put the plane into a dive.

Could have saved that plane. And it's looking like the recent Malaysian crash might have been a stall too.