How safe is flying, really? It is, in fact, the safest form of travel. According to the National Safety Council, you’re more likely to die as a pedestrian, on a motorcycle, in a car, on a bus, riding an animal or animal-drawn vehicle, on a train, on a streetcar or on watercraft.

Some other numbers are even more impressive. On average, air traffic controllers in the United States handle 64 million takeoffs and landings a year. On any given day, more than 87,000 flights are in U.S. skies (only one-third of those are commercial aircraft; the rest are cargo, private planes, etc.). In spite of all that air traffic, the National Transportation Safety Board has reported only 49 deadly U.S. airline accidents since 1982.

According to the handy Web site PlaneCrashInfo.com, which culls information from OAG Aviation Solutions, the NTSB and other airline and data sources, the chance of being killed on a flight is about 8 million to 1. The other way to look at it is if a passenger were to board a random flight once a day, statistically it would take 21,000 years before he or she were killed in a plane crash.

But when a major plane crash occurs, it's a perfect storm — usually a complete failure of common sense and protocol. And it's typically followed by a spike in fear among the flying public.