The statistic Q--hereafter described as death risk per flighf--has a number of attractive properties. It weights each accident by the proportion of passengers killed which is more informative than the response to such questions as"did any passengers perish? "or"was the hull badly hurt? The statistic does justice to empirical evidence by ignoring the length or duration of a flight. And it is easy to understand and to calculate (For further discussion of the statistic, see Barnett and Higgins We will work with Q statistics in the balance of the paper First-World Domestic Jet Services Though the fact might surprise the reader, roughly 2/3 of passenger jet flights in the economically and technologically advanced political democracies, a category in which%p world are domestic services in First-World countries. (We define first-World countries we place Australia, Austria, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New Zealand Norway, Portugal, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United States and the United Kingdom We therefore turn first to the Q-statistic for First-World domestic jet flights, focusing on the 1990s. There were approximately 75 million flights on First World domestic jets over that decade, over which the total number of full-crash equivalents"(i.e. 2xi) was 5.78. Applying(1), therefore, we reach a death risk per flight estimate of I in 13 million One in 13 million is obviously a low number, but how low? If one were to take one flight per day then, at that level of mortality risk, one could on average travel for 36,000 years before succumbing to a fatal crash. To put it another way, a child taking off on a First-World domestic jet is roughly ten times as likely to win a future Olympic Gold Medal as to fail to reach his destination today. In the Massachusetts lottery game called Megabucks, the chance of winning the Jackpot is 1 in 5.2 million. Thus, a Massachusetts resident who buys a lottery ticket is 2.5 times as likely to win the Jackpot as to"lose disastrously on his next domestic flight Such a minimal level of risk--which is well below the comparable figures for decades before the 1990s(see Oster, Strong, and Zorn'at p 81, Barnett and Higgins could reasonably be identified with a golden age of air safety. Indeed, the statistic is so encouraging as to raise a question. Beyond a certain point, a risk becomes so small that it becomes impractical to worry about it. When we bite into a corn muffin, we do not actively consider whether it is poisoned. When we go to the grocery store, we do not fear a ceiling collapse. Is aviation safety likewise a problem that has been essentially solved, to the extent that talking about it might suggest a personality disorder? To that extreme question, the answer is decidedly"no, as we discuss over the next sever al sections4 The statistic Q--hereafter described as death risk per flight—has a number of attractive properties. It weights each accident by the proportion of passengers killed, which is more informative than the response to such questions as “did any passengers perish?” or “was the hull badly hurt?” The statistic does justice to empirical evidence by ignoring the length or duration of a flight. And it is easy to understand and to calculate. (For further discussion of the statistic, see Barnett and Higgins2 .) We will work with Q￾statistics in the balance of the paper. First-World Domestic Jet Services Though the fact might surprise the reader, roughly 2/3 of passenger jet flights in the world are domestic services in First-World countries. (We define first-World countries as economically and technologically advanced political democracies, a category in which we place Australia, Austria, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United States and the United Kingdom.) We therefore turn first to the Q-statistic for First-World domestic jet flights, focusing on the 1990’s. There were approximately 75 million flights on First￾World domestic jets over that decade, over which the total number of “full-crash equivalents” (i.e.
xi) was 5.78. Applying (1), therefore, we reach a death risk per flight estimate of 1 in 13 million. One in 13 million is obviously a low number, but how low? If one were to take one flight per day then, at that level of mortality risk, one could on average travel for 36,000 years before succumbing to a fatal crash. To put it another way, a child taking off on a First-World domestic jet is roughly ten times as likely to win a future Olympic Gold Medal as to fail to reach his destination today. In the Massachusetts lottery game called Megabucks, the chance of winning the Jackpot is 1 in 5.2 million. Thus, a Massachusetts resident who buys a lottery ticket is 2.5 times as likely to win the Jackpot as to “lose” disastrously on his next domestic flight. Such a minimal level of risk—which is well below the comparable figures for decades before the 1990’s (see Oster, Strong, and Zorn3 at p. 81, Barnett and Higgins2 )— could reasonably be identified with a golden age of air safety. Indeed, the statistic is so encouraging as to raise a question. Beyond a certain point, a risk becomes so small that it becomes impractical to worry about it. When we bite into a corn muffin, we do not actively consider whether it is poisoned. When we go to the grocery store, we do not fear a ceiling collapse. Is aviation safety likewise a problem that has been essentially solved, to the extent that talking about it might suggest a personality disorder? To that extreme question, the answer is decidedly “no,” as we discuss over the next several sections