Hey Utah, Death Takes A Holiday When You Travel By Plane

My daughter is very afraid of flying in an airplane. And though we've actually been able to talk her into taking a couple of flights, she really doesn't like the idea of hurtling through the air in a metal tube at 600-miles an hour.

She's a very logical person, so the times we did get her to fly, I was able to appeal to her logical or sensible side.

I used some of these numbers.

• The odds of a person dying in a commercial plane crash are so astronomically low, they are almost zero. In the last 20 years, there were 0.01 deaths per 100 million air miles traveled. That's roughly one death per 10-billion miles traveled. You have a 0.000009% chance of dying in a plane crash.
• As a comparison, commuter trains had four times as many deaths -- although still very safe at four deaths per 10-billoin miles traveled.
• Meanwhile, driving or riding in a car had nearly 100 times more deaths per the same miles traveled. You are 220,000% more likely to die in a car crash than in a plane crash.
• There are approximately 100,000 flights per day worldwide -- and plane crashes are still rare enough that if a commercial flight goes down, it makes headline news all over the world. In fact, when's the last time you remember a commercial plane crash? (Answer, it was 2009 when a plane crashed in Buffalo, New York, killing 50 people).
• Since that crash in 2009, commercials airlines in the United States have transported approximately 8 billion passengers without a single fatal crash.
• In fact, your chances of being in any plane crash are 1 in 11 million.

It's estimated that as much as 40 percent of the US population has a fear of flying (known as aviophobia), although only five percent have said it actually will keep them engaging in any commercial plane travel.

But if logic works against the phobia, know that riding a motorcycle, driving, riding in a train and even riding in a ferryboat is much more deadly.

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