How common is it for an airplaine to crash?

Answer 1

Generally, aircraft do not frequently crash, although when they do, it attracts wide publicity.

Bear in mind that, at any time of the day or night, there are in excess of 11,000 aircraft flying somewhere in the world - perhaps that puts it into perspective.

One of the other answers attributes the cause to 'pilot error' - that is pure rubbish. Pilots do indeed make mistakes, but may incidents/accidents are caused by other factors. The important point is to learn from mistakes etc so that every effort is made to ensure that these are not repeated.

That is why any sensible and intelligent pilot will examine as many accident reports as he can, and learn from them.

I can say with certainty that doing this has saved my life on a number of occasions.

Answer 2

Statistically, they do not crash very often. The amount of injury and death caused by a single crash is why they get so much News Airtime. Go check out airdisaster.com and look through their accident database. You can see which types of planes crash the most, and which airline crash a lot

Answer 3

They are safer than driving ! When you consider the number of people flying, total miles flown, and the millions of hours planes log each year they are very safe. You just hear more about a plane going down because of the number of people in a crash. Car crashes kill a much greater amount of people, but, usually not at one time in the same place.

Answer 4

there is rarely crashes in commercial airplanes. if their are engine failures then it is pretty safe (if you are by an airport) so you can descend and land quickly. mid-air collisions are the most rare. most crashes occur between takeoff and landing.... about 20,000 or more flights takeoff in a day and land. in every year there are only 1 or 2 crashes so if you do the math about 700,000 flights each year and only 2 crash... and some crashes arent fatal to everyone on the plane some crashes everyone .. the one that just happened in kuntucky was the most fatal crash in the last 5 years.lives.

Answer 5

Which is safer flying or driving?
Fatalities per million trips Odds of being killed
on a single trip
Airliner (Part 121) 0.019 52.6 million to 1
Automobile 0.130 7.6 million to 1
Commuter Airline (Part 135 scheduled) 1.72 581,395 to 1
Commuter Plane (Part 135 - Air taxi on demand) 6.10 163,934 to 1
General Aviation (Part 91) 3.3 73,187 to 1



Odds of being on an airline flight which results in at least one fatality Odds of being killed on a single airline flight
Top 25 airlines with the best records
1 in 4.25 million Top 25 airlines with the best records
1 in 6.3 million
Bottom 25 with the worst records
1 in 386,000 Bottom 25 with the worst records
1 in 543,000

Source: BACK Associates and PlaneCrashInfo.com accident database, 1981 - 2004

Answer 6

43,000 people die of the roads in the US every year and it is hardly a footnote in the papers. Today's unfortunate loss of 59 in Kentucky adds up to less than 100 this year in aircraft yet it is front page news. There will be steps taken as a result of today's crash to prevent recurrence - do we even try to seriously address the thousands killed by drunk driving?

Answer 7

About as common as getting struck by lightning, and your chances of dieing in a plane crash are about the same as those of winning the lottery.

Answer 8

Not too often if you are talking about a commercial airliner.

But privately owned planes crash quiet a bit - due to lack of maintenance or inexperience of the pilot (human error).

Answer 9

There are about 3 deaths per 100,000 flight hours in the commercial segment of aviation.

Answer 10

I'm no authority, but I think they crash only once.