In 2024 so far (to the best of my memory), we had one crash on a runway in Japan, but zero casualties (on the jet – several casualties on the other plane – not a jet). And a door fell off a plane in Alaska with zero casualties.
There are always a small number of bush plane or private small plane casualties every year, but they don’t count against jets either.
The Alaska door plug incident didn’t have casualties only because it just so happened nobody was sitting in the two seats directly adjacent to the door plug.
Edit: the point isn’t to dispute whether somebody would have died or not, but to not let a stroke of luck downplay the severity of the actual issue
We are not talking fatalities, we are talking casualties. You cannot convince me that an explosive decompression at 16k feet won’t cause serious injury at the least.
Edit: seat belts are designed against the forces of severe turbulence, not explosive decompressions. Assuming the seat belt actually holds, all the forces are applied against the single point of contact the belt has with the midsection of the passenger. Reminder that the forces were enough to torque two seats, rip the padding off the closest seat, and ripped the shirt off a nearby passenger. I actually think there is a decent chance there would’ve been a fatality should anybody have sat in the closest seat.
No. Commercial passenger Jets are pretty much the safest form of travel that exists by almost every metric. Comparing them against three seater Cessnas that Billybob from Oregon uses for sight-seeing expeditions is not fair. You don’t compare SUVs to bicycles when talking about safety because they both have tires.
Note that military aircraft are also not included. There were a lot of people who died in Jets this year in military contexts. But would you call that fair when putting together the safety metrics?
What about passengers that suffered heart attacks while flying in a commercial plane? Actually, that might be an interesting example, but not in the context of this article. (Tangent: there’s probably a metric here. If you have a heart attack in a vehicle, what are the odds you’re driving, and what are the odds your heart attack causes multiple fatalities as a result. But your travel time to hospital and survival rate might be higher as a passenger – it takes more time for a plane to make an emergency landing. I’d bet those numbers come in close, but it’ll depend on the metric used.)
You always need to pick a reasonable metric. In this case, commercial passenger jets is a good one, because it’s the largest group.
In 2024 so far (to the best of my memory), we had one crash on a runway in Japan, but zero casualties (on the jet – several casualties on the other plane – not a jet). And a door fell off a plane in Alaska with zero casualties.
There are always a small number of bush plane or private small plane casualties every year, but they don’t count against jets either.
The Alaska door plug incident didn’t have casualties only because it just so happened nobody was sitting in the two seats directly adjacent to the door plug.
Edit: the point isn’t to dispute whether somebody would have died or not, but to not let a stroke of luck downplay the severity of the actual issue
Seatbelts are also a thing, assuming you actually follow the safety recommendations.
We are not talking fatalities, we are talking casualties. You cannot convince me that an explosive decompression at 16k feet won’t cause serious injury at the least.
Edit: seat belts are designed against the forces of severe turbulence, not explosive decompressions. Assuming the seat belt actually holds, all the forces are applied against the single point of contact the belt has with the midsection of the passenger. Reminder that the forces were enough to torque two seats, rip the padding off the closest seat, and ripped the shirt off a nearby passenger. I actually think there is a decent chance there would’ve been a fatality should anybody have sat in the closest seat.
in other words, it sounds like a totally meaningless metric.
No. Commercial passenger Jets are pretty much the safest form of travel that exists by almost every metric. Comparing them against three seater Cessnas that Billybob from Oregon uses for sight-seeing expeditions is not fair. You don’t compare SUVs to bicycles when talking about safety because they both have tires.
Note that military aircraft are also not included. There were a lot of people who died in Jets this year in military contexts. But would you call that fair when putting together the safety metrics?
What about passengers that suffered heart attacks while flying in a commercial plane? Actually, that might be an interesting example, but not in the context of this article. (Tangent: there’s probably a metric here. If you have a heart attack in a vehicle, what are the odds you’re driving, and what are the odds your heart attack causes multiple fatalities as a result. But your travel time to hospital and survival rate might be higher as a passenger – it takes more time for a plane to make an emergency landing. I’d bet those numbers come in close, but it’ll depend on the metric used.)
You always need to pick a reasonable metric. In this case, commercial passenger jets is a good one, because it’s the largest group.