Originally Posted by
shawbridge
My wife is concerned about our upcoming trip to Croatia and the Czech Republic (which is preceded by a weekend in Toronto). Her fear is that somehow terrorists will now be targeting passenger planes and maybe that the overall risk of flying is higher.
Like a lot of FTers I fly a lot -- after Eastern Europe, I have a trip to DC and then Frankfurt and home, then the next week London and DC then home, and then Frankfurt the next week, and so it goes. As a result, I compartmentalize my thinking and haven't even thought about the risk of flying.
Do you think that the terrorist attacks on passenger planes is part of a trend that should change the our perception of the probability of flying? Are the other crashes indicative of a trend in the flight-worthiness of planes (e.g., poorer maintenance or willingness to fly in bad conditions)? Or are these just akin to a few heads in a row in a sequence of random coin flips and shouldn't change our assessment of the probability of plane accidents?
I wouldn't qualify MH17 as a terrorist attack.
Safety is generally the same immediately after an accident, but MH17 is a special case. Airliners are avoiding conflict zones more thanks to that atrocity, so it has very marginally increased safety.
Flying after major incidents is, on average, more comfortable because flights may be less crowded.