People who are afraid to fly

I fly a lot, and whenever I find a passenger who is deathly afraid of flying I try to help. If I see someone gripping their armrest until their knuckles are white, or they look frightened, I try to calm them down. It usually goes something like this…

 

“You know, statistically speaking, flying is one of the safest methods of travel. You are more likely to die from a kick from a donkey than in an airplane accident. Think about it…each day there are almost 90,000 flights in the US. That’s 180,000 takeoff and landings. 64 MILLION takeoff and landings a year are handled by air traffic controllers in this country. A full one third of those are commercial planes like the one we are in. The rest are military, cargo, private planes and hired planes like NetJets. Out of those 20 million commercial takeoff and landings a year there is what? One crash a year? Maybe? So I’m going to guess there are about 600 MILLION passengers a year and out of those, a hundred die. One hundred out of 600 million passengers. One plane out of 20 million a year. Those are pretty good odds.”

But then I always end the conversation with…

 

(pointing to the ground)

 

“But then again, this could be that one plane.”