OR JUST STAY HOME:

How to survive a plane crash (ANDREW CHUNG, 11/05/06, TORONTO STAR

[T]he fear of a plane crash is so pervasive because most people think it means certain death. The reality is just the opposite: the majority of people involved in aviation accidents survive.

In what is the most comprehensive research to date on the topic, the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board studied 568 U.S. commercial air carrier accidents from 1983 to 2000 and found that just 12.5 per cent of these accidents had any fatalities at all. And that out of 53,487 passengers on these fatal flights, 51,207 survived. That's almost 96 per cent.

Even in the most serious of those fatal accidents, over 50 per cent of passengers survived. Catastrophic events in which everyone dies are exceedingly rare, the study says.

Though Canadian data from this country's Transportation Safety Board have not been compiled and analyzed in the same way, a look at the available statistics points to a similar conclusion. Between 1989 and 2004, 273 airliners and commuter aircraft were involved in accidents, resulting in 371 passenger and crew deaths. To put that in context, Canadians took more than 87 million flights in 2004 alone.

"The bottom line is it's extremely safe," says Marc-Antoine Plourde, an Air Canada pilot and president of DePlour Research and Training Centre in Montreal, which helps people conquer their fear of flying.

"We explain to people that it's not a fear that is justified given the level of safety. There are 500 to 1,000 deaths attributable to commercial aviation crashes every year, with close to 2 billion passengers flying. With 40,000 deaths in the streets alone in the U.S., and we're not scared of driving, you can see it's psychological."

Todd Curtis, a former Boeing airline safety analyst and accident investigator, says it's easy to get that impression when the media typically cover accidents with major death counts, such as last week's crash in Nigeria in which 96 died and nine survived, but ignore those with few problems.

Of course, your odds of surviving a plane crash very much depend on how much control the pilot is able to exert before impact, Curtis explains. If it's out of control, there's little hope.

"If it's high-speed, nose-to-ground, the ball game's over," he says. "Usually where there are survivors there is some sort of controllability to it."

The NTSB study says improvements in fire retardancy, aircraft configuration, floor lighting, seat and exit design, and evacuation procedures are reflected in the large number of crash survivors. It also says that, armed with the knowledge that survival rates are very high, passengers might do more to improve their own chances of getting out alive.

For Diezyn, this is simply good common sense. "There is a risk," Diezyn says. "You have to be ready for what could happen. It's like going biking without a helmet. It's a bad decision."

Of course, if the aviation industry cared about safety they'd just reverse the seats so you face the back of the plane, which is the single improvement that would save the most fliers. Eventually cars will be configured that way, including the driver's seat.

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 16, 2006 5:58 PM