WS MoreOrLess: How safe is flying?
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This is the short edition of More or Less, first broadcast on the BBC World Service.
Hello and welcome to More or Less on the BBC World Service. I'm Ruth Alexander. And I'm Hannah Moore.
In today's programme, we investigate claims of foul play in the British Premier League as leaders Chelsea complain they're getting too few penalty kicks.
But first, are plane crashes becoming more common? A plane has crashed in the French Alps, killing 150 people on board. News that has shocked the world. There were no survivors from the crash. Only a further dreadful twist as we learned that recordings from inside the plane suggested co-pilot Andres Lubitz had brought it down on purpose.
It's the latest in a series of high-profile crashes of large airliners in around a year.
My initial reaction on hearing the news was, what another plane crash? What's going on?
We actually looked into this about eight months ago, when there were three horrific crashes in just eight days.
There was the Malaysian Airlines flight MH17, which was shot out of the sky by a missile while flying over Ukraine on the 17th of July. The TransAsia Airlines flight, which crashed in Taiwan six days later. And then just a day after that, an Air Algerie flight crashed in Mali.
But statistical and aviation experts assured us that, though horrendous, to have three planes crash in the space of eight days is not as unlikely as you'd intuitively think. If you calculate the chance of that happening over a 10-year period, it's 60%.
So more likely than not. But since then, there have been more big, dramatic crashes. The Alps crash, also the Indonesia Air Asia Airbus that crashed into the Java Sea in bad weather in December. the TransAsia Airways plane which crashed shortly after take-off in Taiwan in February, and of course it's the Malaysia Airlines plane that disappeared. So we've been looking at the numbers again.
And the good news is that the statistics still tell a reassuring story. Looking at the record of flight accidents since 1946, 2014 was actually the year which saw the fewest commercial plane crashes. That is such a surprising fact. It comes from the Aviation Safety Network, which keeps track of incidents, and it counted 21 fatal commercial plane crashes last year, 21 crashes out of about 30 million flights.
Oh, 21 really is a small number then.
Yes, and if you exclude cargo planes from that number and just look only at passenger planes, there were just eight fatal crashes last year and two so far this year. And looking back over time, you can see air travel getting safer. In the 90s, about 30 passenger planes tended to crash a year. In more recent times, we've seen around 15 on average.
But what did spike last year is the number of people killed in the few crashes that happened.
How did the Germanwings A320 crash change public perception of air safety?
Almost 1,000 people died in the eight passenger plane crashes, the most in a single year since 2005. But looking at the overall picture, the average has been falling over the past two decades.
So while the news of a plane crash is always horrifying, plane crash statistics are actually, on the whole, reassuring. Something Cambridge University's Professor for the Public Understanding of Risk, Sir David Spiegelhalter, went on the BBC to make clear.
last year, maybe 1,000 were killed, which is a lot, a very high number. But it still means that for an average person getting on a flight, one in three million chance. And if you're in a modern airline, in a Western major carrier, then the chance is going to be even lower. I think up to maybe one in 20 million chance. And that's roughly cycling a mile or driving 10 miles, which we do every day.
Flying is safer than driving or cycling. It's estimated that more than a million people die on the roads in a year, a thousand times more than died in plane crashes last year.
And it's the very fact that plane crashes are rare that makes them more noticeable, as Professor Spiegelhalter explains.
If you think of it, there's this distinction that people make between a hazard and a risk. And a hazard is something that flying five miles up in a plane is extremely hazardous.
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