Flight Safety

Here’s an interesting story from the world of show business:

Revolutionary Road’s Kate Winslet and her husband, director Sam Mendes, will never be caught smooching on an airplane. That’s because they take separate planes when they fly. Because they stand to see the other being airsick?

No, Kate and Sam they have figured out that if there’s a crash, flying in separate planes insures one of them will still be around for the kids.

That’s called thinking. They probably consider themselves wise and sensible parents. Don’t we all.

But here’s what comes to mind when I read this. How stupid!

Do they take separate cars when they drive everywhere? Because they are far more likely do die in a car crash than in an airplane Even at the height of the Vietnam War more Americans were dying on the roads than in the jungles of Vietnam. Of course the car carnage wasn’t on the television news every night. There was no dramatic moment where Walter Cronkite intoned, “The struggle to make our highways safe cannot be won.” There are no images of countless American drivers being loading into helicopters.

Kate and Sam better not shower together either, cause that’s where far more people die.

According to a risk assessment expert, the odds of dying in an airplane crash in the USA are about 1 in 11,000,000. That is, on average, less than 35 Americans a year. The odds of dying in a car crash in the next year are about 1 in 5,000. So by that measure, it’s 2,200 times safer to fly to Florida than to drive there.

Crazy, right? You don’t believe it. It doesn’t feel right.

But that’s the stats. For every American dying in an airplane, 2,200 die on the road. That’s as many students as a major high school.