I was talking with a friend and explained that I have probably taken 1000 commercial flights (aka a leg - one take-off & landing) over the last 12 years and he said its lucky I haven't died in a crash.

I explained that its better than 1 in a million to die in a plane crash, but he reminded me of "repeated trials" - where if you take the same improbable chance many times, eventually it will happen.

So I decided to calculate the chance:

According to this site the chances are 1 in 9.2 million per flight if you fly one of the 25 safest airlines.

http://www.planecrashinfo.com/cause.htm

Brushing off my first year statistics gave me this equation:

1 - ((9,200,000 -1) /9,200,000)^1,000
Which equals
0.000108689751, which is basically 1 in 10,000 over the last 12 years.

This is not going to change my life, just thought it was an interesting statistic. It has lots of unaccounted variables - short hops vs. long flights, safety of the airline, type of aircraft, mainline vs regional, etc... and I am sure you could get a similar risk for your chances of dying in a car crash, slipping in the shower, etc, etc...


Please feel free to check my math and compute your own odds -- change the 1,000 to your number of flights and plug it into google calculator:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q...=&oq=&gs_rfai=