Originally Posted by
falco
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=
When you consider that there are about 10 million flights per day including all GA, military, cargo and commercial, the odds are amazingly low. There are about 4 million commercial flights per day worldwide of which there is only a crash every 5 months or so world wide, it still makes for low odds, especially for the infrequent flier..apparently the odds of winning the lottery are higher, as are the odds of being struck by lightening on a TUESDAY..and of course the odds of being killed in a car crash are much much higher along with dying from food poisoning on the road or in some cities, getting murdered.
Even a frequent flier has very low odds, ballparking about 1 in 460 million..taking over 10000 flights still makes for miniscule odds, but more than the non frequent flier.
I think the odds of an INCIDENT are much higher though...engine failures, tire blowouts, decompressions, diversions, crazy pax trying to open the door or get into the cockpit, hydraulic leaks.
I myself was in one tire blowout, countless go arounds, one medical diversion, one aborted take off, alot of very very hard landings that opened bins and dropped masks and may or may not have damaged the plane, and one partial hydralic failure forcing us to land without flaps.