If someone were to be in an airplane crash, what are the chances of
them dying from that airplane crash?
(I know the overall statistics for dying in an airplane crash are low,
but i'm specifically wondering what the chances of dying are, assuming
that an airplane does crash)

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Clarification of Question by stockster7-ga on 11 Apr 2004 21:37 PDT

i would also be interested in the chances that a person would survive
an airplane crash on water.

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Clarification of Question by stockster7-ga on 12 Apr 2004 23:29 PDT

This question is in no way related to any fear of flying. It was just
posted to settle an argument.

Here's a figure from 2001. It does not include the deaths onboard the
aircraft used by terrorists on 9/11, since those deaths were not
accidental.

"Globally, the chances of surviving a crash dropped precipitously,
according to Ranter's analysis. In 2001, 1,118 people died out of
1,238 people on board the crashed airplanes, a fatality rate of 90
percent. In the previous decade, only 72 percent of people on board
died in fatal crashes."

http://www.freep.com/money/business/fly2_20020102.htm

I have personally been a passenger in 3 seperate aircraft crashes (all
within 15 months of each other). Now, either I cannot be killed in one
for some reason, or my three chances are up. I guess it depends on how
you look at it. As for my chances of survival...well, let's just say
that I don't fly anywhere anymore.

tutuzdad-ga

Tutuzdad,

You are under a common misconception about probability: that future
chances are affected by past performance. This is entirely untrue,
though it seems intuitively obvious.

If you flip a coin 99 times, and it come up heads every time, then you
might think (assuming a normal coin) that your chances of getting
tails on the hundredth toss would be increased. This is not so. Your
chances of getting tails after a run of 99 heads are exactly the same
as they were on the first toss.

Thus you are neither more nor less likely to be involved in an
airplane crash than anyone else who flies the same amount and under
the same circumstances as you, nor are you more or less likely to die
or be injured if one occurs.

This illustrates a critical point: that you cannot trust your
intuition to tell you accurately about the world. The only way to be
certain is by deriving a rigorous proof or by repeated experiment.

Go ahead and fly!

Alan Kali

Stockster --

The odds of surviving a plane crash in a large or small plane are
quite different.  Pinkfreud's provided an excellent link for
commercial aircraft.

For general aviation (non-scheduled carriers), the AOPA does a safety
analysis called the Nall Report.  The most-recent report is linked
here:
http://www.aopa.org/whatsnew/newsitems/2003/03-1-109.html

Best regards,

Omnivorous-GA

This question is in no way related to any fear of flying. It was just
posted to settle an argument.

I'm sure that no one suspects you of having a fear of flying,
stockster7, but tutuzdad seems to have developed, if not a phobia, at
least a measure of "avoidance behaviour".

And perhaps this is not entirely without basis, considering
pinkfreud's excellent data regarding the apparent increased lethality
of crashes should one occur, at least in commercial aviation.

I wonder what could be the cause of this? A random fluctuation of the
statistics? Decreased airframe strength as a result of new
manufacturing technologies? The increased prevalence of fly-by-wire
systems? An increase in structural failures due to an aging fleet?

Perhaps your question about the lethality of accidents over water is
very apropos. Many of the high casualty crashes in recent years seem
to have been over water, so that could be skewing the numbers. At sea,
survival times would likely be reduced because of the hostility of the
environment and the difficulty of access for rescue.

Only the NTSB knows for sure.

Alan Kali

The commenters should remember that there are lies, damn lies and statistics.

It has often been suggested that more people are kicked to death by
donkeys every year than die in air crashes, and while I'm not
intrigued enough to attempt to verify this strange statement it does
at least make a point.

Statistics state that air travel is safe, based upon number of
casualties and in comparison with other forms of transport. However,
as shown in this thread, statistics also state that once you are
likely to become a casualty, there isn't a heck of a lot that you can
do about it.

My colleague tutuzdad-ga has thankfully beaten the odds three times
and perhaps these experiences have helped him to a more personal
understanding of just how lucky he has been. While statistically he is
no more likely to experience another crash were he to fly, his choice
never to fly again has decreased that likelihood almost to zero.

Poe,

You are correct, tutuzdad has reduced his chances of dying as a
passenger in an airplane crash to zero, though he could still be a
more passive participant.

But has he reduced his chances of dying accidentally? I'm not so sure.
If other forms of transportation turn out to be statistically more
dangerous than air travel for a given pattern of usage, and if
tutuzdad is compelled to travel by some means, then his chances of
dying accidentally are increased, rather than decreased.

And what about the old saw, "Most accidents happen in the home"? If
this turns out to be true, and tutzdad spends the time he would
otherwise have spent flying doing experiments in his garage with
propane, or high voltage electricity, or underwater toasters or
something, then the picture becomes very different indeed.

Alan Kali

Apparently this has decended into a discussion about flying phobias,
whereas the question relates specifically to statistics. With that in
mind I'd like to point out that my original coment was meant more as a
humorous anecdote rather than a serious point about the likliehood of
surviving a plane crash. I am neither blinded by any misconceptions
about statistical calculations nor seriously under the impression that
the next time I fly I will become a death statistic. So please, waste
no time debating my comment when the effort could be better used to
research the customers question.

I have no real fear of flying but make a prudent choice (in my mind)
not to do it anymore based on my bad experiences alone. Simply put,
after 3 crashes in one lifetime it still isn't flying that unnerves
me, it's hitting the ground at high speeds that now tends to cause me
alarm.

tutuzdad-ga

Tutuzdad,

I thought the core question was already answered, and answered well,
by pinkfreud. I am engaging in an ancillary discussion of statistics,
phobias and the perils of homebrew science, in response to your
original comment, that seems both interesting and mildly funny, to the
extent that a serious subject such as air crashes can be considered
"funny".

Alan "Run-on Sentence" Kali

Frankly I was much more entertained and amused by your personal
analysis of my "avoidance behaviour" based on my tounge-in-cheek
comment.

Proceed, Doctor...I'm all ears (now that they've been sewn back on that is)  :)

Thank you pinkfreud for those statistics. They are great and very
helpful. However I am still interested in the statistics for chance of
suvival in a plane crash over water. This fact is part of the argument
i am attempting to settle.

To be perfectly blunt:

I STILL WOULD LIKE STATISTICS ON CHANCES OF DEATH IN A PLANE CRASH OVER WATER.

Tutuzdad,

I did not analyze your "avoidance behaviour", but rather your clever
tongue-in-cheek attempt to make us think that you did not understand
the mathematics of probability.

Jest though it may be, young readers are bound to come by, miss the
witticism, and leave with the impression that past performance
influences the future outcome of random events.

Being a good sport, I thought it best lightly to point out the
(joking) error, since this is an area where even many very learned
people make honest mistakes. I've seen whole classroms full of
students of Introductory Epidemiology at the second or third year
university level who were either carrying the joke WAY too far, or
else truly did not understand.

Sorry to spoil the fun, but I have compassion for those who might not "get it".

Anyway, I'll shut up now. Sorry stockster7. ON WITH THE ANSWER!

Alan Kali

OK, Stockster7, here's your answer.

I downloaded the NTSB accident data for 2002 from the NTSB FTP site at:

ftp://www.ntsb.gov/avdata/Access95/av2002.exe

The big problem with using this data to answer your question is that
the NTSB doesn't have a specific field in its database to indicate
whether the flight was occurring over water at the time of the
accident. They have a field called landing_surf, and this may contain
"WATE" for water, but mostly that entry is completed for seaplanes
INTENDED to land on water. There is some variation in this, but that's
the general idea. Most airplanes lost at sea or over water are marked
with "UNK" for unknown in the landing_surf field.

Unfortunately, this means that one has to search the narrative fields
for evidence that the flight terminated in water, and that is a big
pain. The narrative descriptions do not follow any set pattern, and
while the first line will generally give the landing surface, there is
no set description upon which to search.

The NTSB indexes a lot of very minor accidents, so that means a lot of
reading of narratives. You could pick accidents by severity of
aircraft damage, but that can also contain an "UNK" value for unknown.
I decided to select accidents from all operational categories (general
as well as commercial aviation) that had at least one fatality, in
other words "fatal accidents" in order to limit the size of the
sample.

Then, I selected accidents that had "UNK" or "WATE" in the landing
type field and looked through them to determine which ones were
actually over water at the time of the accident. Those that actually
occurred over terrain, I selected out and lumped back in with all the
rest of the fatal accidents.

Here are my results:

Of 15 fatal accidents that occurred over water in 2002, 25 people
aboard died out of a total of 33 people. That is a survival rate of
24.2% for accidents in which at least one person died.

Of 228 fatal accidents that occurred over terrain in 2002, 370 people
aboard died out of a total of 484 people. That is a survival rate of
23.6% for accidents in which at least one person died.

In summary then, your chances of surviving a fatal air accident in
2002 were slightly better for accidents occurring over water.

This is a very small sample, and it does not make any distinction by
type of aviation, type of aircraft or anything else. If you want other
information, please let me know since I have the queries all set up.

I would have done more years or sampled "all accidents" or "all
serious accidents", but it is tedious looking through the narratives
to determine whether the crash occurred over water. Also, I would have
to make changes to each database because the NTSB has all their data
from recent years set up in Access 95. I do not have a copy of Access
95 (haven't seen that one for years, though I had a rare old look
tonight). Unfortunately, Access 95 queries do not work straight off
the bat in later versions of Access, because the scripting language
for the product changed to VB Script. The IsNull test doesn't work the
same way, so I had to change all the crosstab queries - they were
producing blank data sets. Maybe I should email the changes back to
the NTSB, huh? ;-)

If you have anything important riding on this answer, you may want to
ask for a recount. The sample size is way too small to be reliable.
Although I did not do any error bars or confidence tests, I am pretty
sure that my confidence levels would be low.

Best Regards,

Alan Kali

thank you for that great info. I am still interested in some more
reliable statistics on plane crashes over water. Maybe there is an
easier way...?

was looking out of self interest recently.
here are some good sites:
"Odds of being on an airline flight which results in at least one fatality 
Top 25 airlines with the best records
1 in 3.72 million  
Bottom 25 airlines with the worst records
1 in 419,000"
"Odds of being killed on a single airline flight 
Top 25 airlines with the best records
1 in 7.71 million  
Bottom 25 airlines with the worst records
1 in 558,000"
http://www.planecrashinfo.com/cause.htm


"your chances of being on a flight that crashes and kills people would
be 1 in 4,178,464. You could fly one flight per day for more than
11,000 years without incident."
www.safetycenter.navy.mil/media/groundwarrior/ issues/Winter02/whatsmore.htm

various statistics:
http://aviation-safety.net/statistics/index.html