Air travel a leap of faith

Published 9:32 am Friday, July 25, 2014

WASHINGTON — Airline travel requires passengers to make a leap of faith, entrusting their lives to pilots, airlines, air traffic controllers and others who regulate air travel.

Even after a week of multiple tragedies in worldwide aviation, “There isn’t much that we can do to manipulate how we fly as passengers. But we also shouldn’t worry too much,” said Phil Derner, founder of the aviation enthusiast website NYC Aviation.

With one passenger plane being shot out of the sky and two crashing during storms, aviation experts said there was no pattern suggesting a huge gap in airline safety measures.

Email newsletter signup

“One of things that makes me feel better when we look at these events is that if they all were the same type event or same root cause, then you would say there’s a systemic problem here, but each event is unique,” said Jon Beatty, president and CEO of the Flight Safety Foundation, an airline industry-supported nonprofit in Alexandria, Va., that promotes global aviation safety.

Less than 1 in 2 million flights last year ended in an accident that damaged a plane beyond repair, according to the International Air Transport Association. The statistic includes accidents involving cargo and charter airlines in its data as well as scheduled passenger airline flights. This week’s aviation disasters have the potential to push airline fatalities this year to over 700 deaths — the most since 2010. And 2014 is still barely half over.