Are Airplanes Safe Essay Research Paper Are

Are Airplanes Safe? Essay, Research Paper Are Airplanes Safe? TWA Flight 800, EgyptAir Flight 990, and Alaska Air Flight 461 and countless other flight numbers from the past decade all have one major thing in common with each other. All three are commercial airline flights that have gone down with no survivors, and all of these flights have happened in the past five years. All three of these mentioned accidents got extensive publicity in the few weeks after they occurred, the reason for this was because of the great number of people that were killed on each flight. On TWA Flight 800, all 212 passengers were killed. On EgyptAir Flight 990, all 167 people lost their lives; and all 88 passengers aboard Alaska Air Flight 461 were killed on its final flight. Some of the causes for

these, and countless other accidents, range from fuel tank explosions all the way to possible pilot suicide, and many crashes still have unknown causes. Despite the widespread publicity of many plane crashes lately, planes are still one of the safest, if not the safest, methods of transportation. The fear of flying has risen dramatically in the past few years. This is mainly due to the worldwide publicity of plane crashes in the media. The millions of people that see the devastation that tears families apart and shatters millions of relationships on television don’t want it to happen to them. What the media doesn’t show the world is the pain and suffering that is brought to thousands of families who have lost loved ones in automobile accidents. This causes many Americans to

drive to their destinations rather than fly, but is driving really a safer way to travel than flying? Extensive research over the past several years has shown that flying is in fact the safest method of transportation. It beat out the three other major forms of transportation in the United States, which are: planes, cars, buses, and trains. In a 1997 Newsweek magazine study testing deaths per 100 million miles for different forms of transportation, it was proven that planes have the lowest death rate per 100 million miles of traveling. Cars have .94 deaths per 100 million miles traveled, while trains have .04 deaths and planes and buses each came out the same with .01 deaths per 100 million miles traveled. Of course, you can’t use those statistics alone to determine which

method is the safest method of transportation. When you look at the statistics, you see that there are hundreds of automobile accidents daily across the United States, but only a small percent of these crashes involve fatalities. On the other hand, there are very few aircraft crashes in the United States per year, but when there is a crash, there is usually a fairly large loss of life involved. This is the main reason why nearly every large plane that crashes anywhere makes the front page headline in nearly every newspaper across the world. Then there are automobile accidents. Automobile accidents rarely make anything but local news. The inequality of the news coverage for these two things gives many people a false impression that automobiles are actually safer than planes, even

though statistics say that planes are actually the safer of the two. The fear of crashing is not the only reason why many people choose not to fly, however. There are several reasons why many people would rather drive than fly. Some of these reasons include: flight delays, lost luggage, overcrowded flights, bad food, stale air, uncomfortable seats, and bad customer service. In fact, during the first half of the year in 1999, the Department of Transportation received over 16,000 complaints from passengers. This was over double the amount of complaints for the same part of the year in 1998. Even though some of these were viable complaints, some people don’t think driving the extra hours in an automobile is worth it. One of the most frequently asked questions after a plane crashes