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September 21, 2023 - January 24, 2024
But what no politician mentioned is that air travel is safer than driving. Dramatically safer—so much so that the most dangerous part of a typical commercial flight is the drive to the airport.
An American professor calculated that even if terrorists were hijacking and crashing one passenger jet a week in the United States, a person who took one flight a month for a year would have only a 1-in-135,000 chance of being killed in a hijacking—a trivial risk compared to the annual 1-in-6,000 odds of being killed in a car crash.
It turned out that the shift from planes to cars in America lasted one year. Then traffic patterns went back to normal. Gigerenzer also found that, exactly as expected, fatalities on American roads soared after September 2001 and settled back to normal levels in September 2002. With these data, Gigerenzer was able to calculate the number of Americans killed in car crashes as a direct result of the switch from planes to cars.
It was 1,595. That is more than one-half the total death toll of history’s worst terrorist atrocity. It is six times higher than the total number of people on board the doomed flights of September 11. It is 319 times the total number of people killed by the infamous anthrax attacks of 2001. And yet almost nobody noticed but the families of the dead. And not even the families really understood what had happened. They thought—they still think—that they lost husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, and children to the routine traffic accidents we accept as the regrettable cost of living in the modern
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Montaigne, who wrote “the thing I fear most is fear” more than three and a half centuries ago.
It’s no exaggeration to say that our species owes its very existence to fear. But “unreasoning fear” is another matter.
Why have we become a “culture of fear”?
“A story you can’t afford to miss!”—is an excellent way to get someone’s attention.
