Flying Without Fear

Airline executives like to point outthat flying is safer than driving on majorhighways, and the numbers help provetheir case. After a disastrous year in2001, when 531 passengers died onscheduled airline flights (half of them inthe September 11 terrorist attacks), commercialairlines enjoyed a fatality-freeyear in 2002. Statistics from the NationalTransportation Safety Board show thatthere were just 34 accidents on scheduledairlines last year, none of them fatal,marking the first time in 2 decades thatthere were no deaths on commercial airlineflights. The overall trend towardfewer accidents also continued last year.The accident rate for scheduled airlinesdropped down to 3.3 per million departures,an 11% reduction from the 2001rate of 3.7 accidents per million departures.In 2002, there were nearly 43,000deaths on US highways.