Christensen 1
Trey Christensen
Professor Peet
ASU 101
29 November 2016
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.
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 o...
