For white-knuckled airline travelers, there’s good news: boarding scheduled US airliners is safer than ever, says The New York Times.
There were no fatalities in 2002 and only one death in 32.6 million passenger departures last year, according to the National Transportation Safety Board.
“There hasn’t been a major crash – knock on wood – in nearly two years,” said Doug Wills, a spokesman for the Air Transport Association.
”And even if your plane does go down, the chances that you will walk away from the wreckage have improved sharply in recent years,” reported the newspaper.
“Air travelers tend to believe that if you’re in an accident, you’re not going to survive,” said Nora Marshall, chief of the safety board’s survival factors division of the Office of Aviation Safety. “That’s not true.”
In a study of 568 accidents between 1983 and 2000 involving scheduled passenger flights of U.S. airlines, she said, 95% of the passengers survived..
One reason for the improving safety record is the increased training that crew members are getting in moving passengers efficiently out of a downed plane.
In recent years, more passengers are hurt from turbulence than crashes or even plane evacuations, airline officials told the newspaper.
Report by David Wilkening
