"R J Carpenter" wrote in message
...

"JohnT" wrote in message
...

Why? Travelling by air, even taking into account the fact that
occasionally
really nasty things happen, is 99.99 per cent safe.

Very few people would make air trips if flying were that unsafe. There
would be a crash about once a day in the USA.

Guesstimate that each of the top 25 airports in the USA have an average of
300 departures per day (some have much more). That makes vaguely 7500
departures per day, just counting the major airports. JohnT threw out the
number of one problem per ten thousand flights. That would mean roughly
one
airliner crash per day in the USA. There have been about 1000 days since
"9/11". IIRC, it has been a number of years since a mainline US airliner
crash.

I believe the last one was the Airbus that went down over Brooklyn. Those of
us with at least 3-4 decades under our belts can remember a time when
commercial airliners went down a couple times every year, and that was in
countries with state-of-the-art aircraft and control systems.

Example: Windshear. When was the last time you heard of an airliner being
brought down by windshear? Last incident I can recall in the US was at DFW
in the mid-1980s. Since then airports have installed detection equipment.