Aviation safety has come a long way in over one hundred years of implementation. In modern times, two major manufacturers still produce heavy passenger aircraft for the civilian market:Boeing of the United States of America and the European company Airbus. Both have placed huge emphasis on the use of aviation safety equipment, now a billion-dollar industry in its own right, and made safety a major selling point—realizing that a poor safety record in the aviation industry is a threat to corporate survival. Some major safety devices now required in commercial aircraft involve:
- Evacuation slides — aid rapid passenger exit from an aircraft in an emergency situation.
- Advanced avionics - Computerized auto-recovery and alert systems.
- Turbine engines - durability and failure containment improvements
- Landing gear - that can be lowered even after loss of power and hydraulics.
When measured on a passenger-distance calculation, air travel is the safest form of transportation available: these figures are the ones mentioned by the air industry when quoting statistics on air safety. A typical statement is this one by the BBC: "UK airline operations are among the safest anywhere. When compared against all other modes of transport on a fatality per mile basis air transport is the safest — six times safer than traveling by car and twice as safe as rail."
However, when measured by fatalities per person transported, buses are the safest form of transportation and the number of air travel fatalities per person are surpassed only by bicycles and motorcycles. This statistic is the one used by the insurance industry when calculating insurance rates for air travel.
For every billion kilometers traveled, trains have a fatality rate 12 times larger than air travel, while automobiles have a fatality rate 62 times larger. On the other hand, for every billion journeys, buses are the safest form of transportation. By the last measure air transportation is three times more dangerous than car transportation and almost 30 times more dangerous than bus.
Over 95% of people in U.S. plane crashes between 1983 and 2000 survived. A 2007 study by Popular Mechanics found that passengers sitting at the back of a plane are 40% more likely to survive a crash than those sitting in the front, although this article also quotes Boeing, the FAA and a website on aircraft safety, all claiming that there is no safest seat. The article studied 20 crashes, not taking in account the developments in safety after those accidents. However, a flight data recorder is usually mounted in the aircraft's empennage (tail section), where it is more likely to survive a severe crash.
- Where to sit on the plane
While there is some evidence to suggest that the rear of the plane is the safest part, this is by no means always true. Speaking in an interview in January 1973, a survivor of the 1972 Andes crash, Alfredo Delgado, had an ominous feeling that the plane was going to crash and tried to sit in the rear of the plane before take-off, believing that it was the safest spot. He told reporters “I was so convinced that I sat on a seat at the back, because my experience told me that the plane’s tail was much safer than the other parts of the plane.”
After having been told by the cabin crew that the back seats were reserved, Delgado had to move and ended up in a seat in the middle of the plane, “I saved my life by not being seated at the tail, because the tail came off the rest of the plane’s body,” he concluded. Similarly, one of the few survivors of the Madrid plane crash in August 2008, 30 year old Briton Kim Tate Perez, survived the crash because she had been sitting in row 6, the exact spot where the plane ripped in two, throwing her clear of the wreckage.
website:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_accidents_and_incidents
