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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 July 2016
Flying is now an acceptably safe form of transport. This is obviously so because if it were not so people would not fly. Nevertheless it is a remarkable thing to be able to say. Consider for a moment what it means in terms of engineeering achievement. If you were to start from scratch to design a safe transport system would you for example
1. Design a vehicle with such a light structure and such minimal factors of safety.
2. Make it so that it cannot stop in a fog but has a minimum speed of over 100 mph.
3. Make it so that it can cross oceans and mountain ranges but cannot stop until it gets to the other side.
4. Make it reliant on complex electronic and electro mechanical devices for navigation, collision avoidance and even for control.
5. Use a fuel which, according to type, has a flash point little above and sometimes actually below atmospheric temperature and which is carried in very large quantities.
One could go on listing such absurdities but these are sufficient to establish that, by all the rules, flying has no right to be safe. The fact, however, is different. Flying is many times safer than travelling by road and is, by any reasonable criterion, one of the safest of all the available modes of travel.