AviationGeeks.com - Facts on Aviation Safety

Photo by Radim Spalek

Nearly 100,000 people are in the skies over the United States at any one time during daylight.

Approximately ten million flights take off and land in the U.S. each year.

Boeing airliner takes off or lands somewhere in the world every 2.5 seconds.

You would have to fly a commercial airliner every day for 16,000 years before you would be involved in a major accident.

Airplane without its engines is just a glider! An airliner flying at 35,000 feet can glide about 100 miles in the extremely unlikely event all engines fail? The higher a plane is flying, the farther it can glide.

Two engine plane can easily fly on one engine. Even if the engine fails during takeoff, the pilot can still fly the plane.

The door of an airplane cannot be opened during a flight. Pressure holds the door in place.

Aircraft windows have three separate layers to them and the two inner ones are backups for the outer one.

Manufacturers put planes through vigorous tests before the planes ever see a passenger. They continually make sure the planes can fly safely under extreme conditions.

The reason cabin lights blink occasionally is when the power is transferred from the Auxiliary Power Unit to the plane’s generators.

Flights won’t take off or land in dangerous conditions.

Lightings shouldn´t have any effect on the aircraft.

Turbulence is moving air (often two air streams moving at different speeds meeting) and isn’t a threat to planes.

That is an estimated total of approximately 36.6 fatal events (at least one person died) per 16 million flights.

3 million passengers fly every day and usually (almost always) without any accidents.

Airbus A340 is the safest airliners in the world with over 18 million hours flying without accident. The 777 is close second with about the same number of hours, but has had one accident, although there were no fatalities.

Technically, the fear of flying is a Specific Phobia, one of several kinds of Anxiety Disorders. As an anxiety, the “fear” of flying is more concerned with what might happen than with what actually is happening.

500 times as many people die in car accidents as in airline accidents.

Stories of aircraft accidents are between 150 to 200 times more likely to receive front-page coverage than other more common causes of death.

Each plane flies right down the middle of a private highway in the sky that is ten miles wide. No other plane is allowed in that space.

Standard industry policy is to avoid all thunderstorms by at least twenty nautical miles.