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Q: I live in Estes Park and would love to have a dear friend from Philadelphia come to visit me. We haven’t seen each other in six years. The problem is her fear of flying. Do you have any credible stats that show how much safer flying is than driving? — G. Treacy, Estes Park
A: For this I turn to Patrick Smith, a.k.a. Ask the Pilot (), who is indeed a pilot and air-travel columnist who has written several times on this subject. In a mid-2010 blog post about fear and flying (““) he cites a 2003 study by American Scientist magazine that took on the flying-versus-driving question. From Smith’s post: “To be as conservative as possible, their technique calculated probabilities based not on kilometers covered, but on numbers of takeoffs and landings, when over 90 percent of air crashes occur. And they considered highway data only from rural interstates — the safest driving environment. Their data showed that if a passenger chooses to drive, rather than fly, the distance of a typical flight segment, he is 65 times more likely to be killed.”
In the same blog post, Smith also points out that in the decade leading up to 2010, the nation’s airline-related fatal accident rate declined 83 percent, and the number of people flying annually increased by 20 percent. Kyle Wagner
