Santiago Bilinkis l Risk and Reward - Trying to live a life out of the comfort zone

Everyone that flies from time to time, knows that aeronautics are an overwhelmingly safe way to get yourself around. Much safer than any other of your alternatives.

Even so, when an accident occurs like the Air France disaster, frequent travelers feel stressed out by the monstrous drama that generates an improbable situation in which something (or better yet, everything) turns out bad. (the previous post seems prophetic, right?

To make things even more complicated, in spite of always being told that turbulence or lightning can’t harm an airplane, some mention that this is the possible cause of the plane crash. Every time that we experience violent turbulence or fly through electrical storms, travelers always find comfort in this phrase ‘they are unpleasant but inoffensive”. If we eliminate this hypothesis there would be a lot more people that would be afraid to fly. And Martin with his posts too!

In spite of the fact that driving a car statistically is more risky than flying, everyone feels safer behind a steering wheel or a car. This is the product of two very interesting psychological effects:

On one side, the cognitive slant called “Illusion of Superiority” (link is only in English, if someone finds it in Spanish pass it to me): the grand majority of people believe that they are better than the rest at most things.

Specifically, a study done years ago in The United States showed that drivers of 93% of automobile drivers say that they have more superior driving abilities than average. This is also known as the “Better than average effect” or the “Lake Wobegon”. It’s obvious that if the rest are the average population, then approximately half of the people should be better and the other half lower.

On another note, studies also show that the act of one thinking they’re better than the rest is subject to this effect. An effect called “The Bias Blind spot” shows that the majority of people believe that everyone else thinks they are better than average BUT NOT THEMSELVES!
- The other effect is related to the cognitive slant known as “Illusion of Control”: the act of driving is under our control, while in an airplane we depend on others, that makes us feel safer driving. Although the probabilities go against how we feel.

Above all, I believe that when there is no other refuge, from the most extreme rationality, we turn to the statistics to find tranquility. The Internet page Airsafe is one of the best resources for the analysis of the risks of flying. Among other things, not just to show how overwhelmingly safe it is to fly, but more to allow us to compare the rate of accidents within the different airlines (Latin America here), also the risk of different models of airplanes.

This page includes a guide that offers help to those that suffer from a fear of flying.
And closing on a more relaxed note, in the time of the dotcom boom there existed a site that was called AmIGoingDown.com that gave you the data of your flights place of departure, arrival, climate, ect, half seriously and half jokingly, the exact probability that your plane will crash. It closed in 2001 but like always the Wayback Archive has a copy if you want to see and use it.

And at last, I put two videos of incredible landings.

An emergency landing in the Island of Saint Marteen, where there was a beach on the landing point and the plane passed over just centimeters above the heads of the tourists:

- An incredible 747 landing. (You can see here a 747, on a cross-wind landing!).

Foto: Francois Roche