Flying so safe now your biggest risk is on the ground

Despite higher fees and fewer seats, the airlines have some good news ending the holiday season and starting a new year: Flying on US airlines has become so safe that many experts believe the biggest risk of a trip is on the ground.

Motorists beware: you’re far more likely to die driving to the airport than flying across the country.

The past decade has been the best in the country's aviation history with 153 fatalities. That's two deaths for every 100 million passengers on commercial flights, according to an Associated Press analysis of government accident data.

“The improvement is remarkable. Just a decade earlier, at the time the safest, passengers were 10 times as likely to die when flying on a US plane,” writes the San Francisco Chronicle. The risk of death was even greater during the start of the jet age, with 1,696 people dying – 133 out of every 100 million passengers – from 1962 to 1971. The figures exclude acts of terrorism.

"I wouldn't say air crashes of passenger airliners are a thing of the past. They're simply a whole lot more rare than they used to be," said Todd Curtis, a former safety engineer with Boeing and director of the Airsafe.com Foundation.

“Airline industry and government officials said this month that to improve safety on scheduled flights by US passenger and cargo carriers, they are focusing more on countering hazards present before takeoff and after touchdown,” says foxnews.com.

The airline industry uses the term “surface threats” for these hazards. They include ramp collisions, pilots who take the wrong runway and risk crashing with another plane, and aircraft sliding off wet or slippery pathways.

Airline pilots have long reported that moving large planes on the ground in busy airports with poor visibility is among their most dangerous moments.

There was a series of near collisions on runways across the US in 2007, when the Federal Aviation Administration called for new actions. Since then, accident numbers have dropped, according to official aviation statistics.

That’s largely because over the past few years, safety programs have achieved remarkable success in reducing airborne risks, says Fox News.

Joint industry-government efforts have made once-deadly problems such as navigation errors, engine malfunction’s a rarity. Another safety factor is that advances in cockpit technology have all but eliminated traditional threats such as jets flying into mountains in bad weather because of sudden wind changes.

“America’s skies are the safest they have ever been,” said Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood at a recent press briefing.

But officials warn that their attention should now turn to continuing safety improvements on the ground accidents.

“We’ve learned how to operate planes very, very well in the air,” said Richard Healing, a former member of the National Transportation Safety Board. Now, “runway events are much more likely to pose a major hazard than in-flight problems,” he said.

The current outlook for “general aviation,” however, which includes private and some corporate flights, is far less optimistic.

Media reports say that more than 450 people died in US general-aviation accidents last year, amounting to one fatal accident for every 100,000 flight hours.

By comparison, from the late 1990s to the end of the last decade, the fatal-crash rate of US scheduled carriers fell by more than 80 percent. There were no fatalities at all in some years.

The goal by 2025 is to cut today’s low accident risk in half and down to one fatality for every 22 million flights, US government officials outlined in a briefing. That would be dozens of times as safe as the world-wide rate.

There are still some corners of the world where flying is risky. Russia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Somalia have particularly high rates of deadly crashes.

Africa only accounts for 3 percent of world air traffic but had 14 percent of fatal crashes.

By David Wilkening