Following Sunday’s Ethiopian Airline Boeing 737 Max crash in which Professor Pius Adesanmi, Ambassador Biodun Bashua and all other passengers and crew members lost their lives, the question of which is safer between travel by plane and car has become topical again.
There is no doubt that a single aircrash brings a rude awakening to the fact that once an aircraft takes off, no human being is in control; not even the pilot if there is any failure in the machine or disorientation in the environment the airplane is flying through. That is when many of us remember God!
The fear of being suspended in the air is one we do not have when in a cat or bus because we are on the ground. If you are uncomfortable with the way the driver is behaving, you can tell him to stop for you to alight.
Unfortunately, you cannot tell the pilot to stop mid-air for you to disembark. You are stuck, so to speak, and at the mercies of several factors as soon as the plane takes off.
Although a single plane crash always rekindles in us a fear of flying because fatalities seem high in terms of how many die in one crash, the truth is, according to statistics, flying on a plane on average is overwhelmingly safer than riding in a car or other road vehicle. One major reason is that planes don’t crash every day, whereas several road accidents occur daily with fatalities!
Knowing the odds that aircraft have to battle with off the ground with gravity, weather and engine failures, air safety measures have always been very stringent and hardly does an aircraft go up without all the checks by qualified professionals in related fields. This is quite unlike land vehicles where drivers mostly jump in and take off without checks.
In addition, no unqualified person is allowed to fly a plane. Flying qualifications take years to acquire, as against one-week drivers courses or no driving school experience at all by many of us, especially in our country Nigeria.
Added to this is the air safety standard applied to the air space, with air controllers and radars on duty 24 hours a day to ensure smooth take off, landing and passage for every registered aircraft from country to country.
Therefore, fatal air crashes are quite few apart unlike road accidents.
No fewer than 2,598 Nigerians died in road accidents between October, 2017 and March, 2018, according to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS). That’s in just six months.
The breakdown showed that 1, 306 Nigerians died in road accidents in the fourth quarter of 2017 while 1, 292 people died in accident in the first quarter of 2018.
According to the data, 2,489 road accidents occurred in the fourth quarter of 2017 while 2,482 accidents were recorded in the first quarter of 2018.
In 2017, the Federal Road Safety Corps ( FRSC ) recorded 4,410 deaths in 7,937 road accidents with 23,392 victims injured. The figures were said to be lower than the number recorded in 2016 which was 4,527 deaths with 26,749 injured.
Conversely, while there were crashes by aircraft during that period, the fatalities, even up till 2019 is quite low and these were largely from military aircraft in service at the war zones. Of course there were several near misses by commercial airplanes but none to rival road crashes or misses.
Data from the US also shows that in 2015, there were 32,166 fatal motor vehicle accidents that led to over 35,000 deaths. That comes out to be 1.13 fatalities per 100 million vehicle miles traveled, and nearly 11 people for every 100,000 U.S. residents.
Compare these road figures to airline crash data put together by the US National Transportation Safety Board which shows that in 2015, preliminary statistics revealed a total of 27 total accidents; none of them was fatal. Of the accidents that did occur, just 0.155 happened for every 100,000 flight hours. Airline accidents per one million miles flown came in at a rate of 0.0035.
Put it another way: Americans have a 1 in 114 chance of dying in a car crash, according to the Natiional Safety Council whereas the odds of dying in air and space transport incidents, which include private flights and are 1 in 9,821.
In pure statistical terms worldwide, it is more dangerous to ride in a car or bus than to fly on a plane. But as I said earlier, it is easy to see why the public often assumes otherwise. Car accidents may happen every day all over the world but many of them are minor with little or no injury. Air crashes, on the other hand, can be catastrophic, deadly events.
Image credit: ndtv.com
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Ogie Eboigbe, veteran journalist, broadcaster and public affairs specialist writes and analyses current and historical issues with a ‘wise pen’.
Fantastic piece. Whatever the mode of travel, entrust it to our Lady.
Road transportation is safer than Air transportation