Are Airplanes Safe

Are Airplanes Safe? TWA Flight 800, Egypt Air Flight 990, and Alaska Air Flight 461 and countless other flight numbers from the past decade all have one major thing in common with each other. All three are commercial airline flights that have gone down with no survivors, and all of these flights have happened in the past five years. All three of these mentioned accidents got extensive publicity in the few weeks after they occurred, the reason for this was because of the great number of people that were killed on each flight. On TWA Flight 800, all 212 passengers were killed. On Egypt Air Flight 990, all 167 people lost their lives; and all 88 passengers aboard Alaska Air Flight 461 were killed on its final flight. Some of the causes for these, and countless other accidents, range from fuel tank explosions all the way to possible pilot suicide, and many crashes still have unknown causes. Despite the widespread publicity of many plane crashes lately, planes are still one of the safest, if not the safest, methods of transportation. The fear of flying has risen dramatically in the past few years. This is mainly due to the worldwide publicity of plane crashes in the media. The millions of people that see the devastation that tears families apart and shatters millions of relationships on television don’t want it to happen to them. What the media doesn’t show the world is the pain and suffering that is brought to thousands of families who have lost loved ones in automobile accidents. This causes many Americans to drive to their destinations rather than fly, but is driving really a safer way to travel than flying? Extensive research over the past several years has shown that flying is in fact the safest method of transportation. It beat out the three other major forms of transportation in the United States, which are: planes, cars, buses, and trains. In a 1997 Newsweek magazine study testing deaths per 100 million miles for different forms of transportation, it was proven