Am I going down? App for the fearful of flying.

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#1224154 28-Jan-2015 15:48

Geektastic:

I wonder what the chances of being run through with a Roman gladius before 4pm today are?

Pffff. As if that is going to ha

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Sideface

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#1224166 28-Jan-2015 15:56

BTR: Fear of flying is nothing that sedatives and half a bottle of wine can't fix.

Not true.
Terror becomes terror + confusion.

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jonb

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#1224211 28-Jan-2015 16:30

Reminds me of this XKCD

XKCD Tornado Guard

TLD

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#1224237 28-Jan-2015 17:24

SaltyNZ: I worry about odds too. I worry about people's inability to appropriately estimate them. If you're afraid of flying, why aren't you so terrified of driving that you faint at the sight of a Top Gear ad? Or the thought of having a shower? You could say it's because flying is unnatural, but so is driving, having a shower, or posting on Geekzone. I honestly don't get it.

Posting on Geekzone is dangerous?! I'm outa here!

Trevor Dennis
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TLD

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#1224240 28-Jan-2015 17:28

jonb: Reminds me of this XKCD

Don't some sites refuse to put up an average until there is a meaningful number of reviews? It's a good point though.

I usually head for Amazon when looking into potential new kit, because you tend to get heaps of reviews from people who have actually paid their own dollars for the kit already.

Trevor Dennis
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#1224261 28-Jan-2015 18:14

SaltyNZ: I worry about odds too. I worry about people's inability to appropriately estimate them. If you're afraid of flying, why aren't you so terrified of driving that you faint at the sight of a Top Gear ad? Or the thought of having a shower? You could say it's because flying is unnatural, but so is driving, having a shower, or posting on Geekzone. I honestly don't get it.

You are missing the point entirely - phobias have nothing to do with logic.
By definition, phobias are "an extreme, irrational fear of or aversion to something".
People with phobias KNOW that their fears are illogical - logic doesn't help them - that's their problem.
You honestly don't get it ...

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fizzychicken

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#1224288 28-Jan-2015 19:02

I have every episode, including the current running season 14, of mayday air crash investigation....mainly because it is one of the best documentary tv shows going...that and seconds from disaster. I do enjoy keeping a few eps on my iPad and playing them on flights, it is quite good evil fun to watch people turn away from you once they realise that you are watching quality recreations of planes crashing at sea or on runways.
I personally have no fear of flying and never consider that my flight would crash. The show has taught me so much about the aspects of flying. Missus loves the show too. Having been in two near fatal road accidents, I am far more concerned when I am on the ground.

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SaltyNZ

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#1224294 28-Jan-2015 19:25

Sideface:
You are missing the point entirely - phobias have nothing to do with logic.

I'm not so much talking about phobias. I know that people who have real phobias are aware of their issue, and that it isn't logical.

I mean 'normal' dumb fears of things. People who don't have phobia of flying, but merely get really nervous, even though they're perfectly comfortable in a car. People who are afraid of terrorists, but not dogs. People who are afraid of sharks, but not slipping in the shower.

This week's dumb fear: irradiated food, which article brought to you by world renowned physicist, chemist, and biologist Sue Kedgley. ZOMG RADIATION! From radioactive stuff! With a scary-sounding sciency name! Out of a nukular reactor! That has to be transported in special concrete and steel drums! Won't somebody think of the children! Well... yeah, they are. They're using a method to protect our biosecurity that doesn't leave an ecosystem full of concentrated poison. But don't let that get in the way of your ignorance.

That's the kind of thing that I don't get.

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blakamin

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#1224299 28-Jan-2015 19:40

My daughters (5 and 11) thought Melbourne and Adelaide airports were boring after a rough landing in Welly where they were treating it like a rollercoaster. I actually had to quiet them down a bit in case other passengers weren't having as much fun.
They think MEL and ADL should have shorter runways.

Mind you this is them, heads resting on the outward leaning glass 88 floors up, and they wanted to do "The Edge" but there was an hour wait.

jpoc

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#1224397 28-Jan-2015 22:28

TLD: All very well seeing >4m:1 chance against crashing, but those same people buy Loto tickets where the odds show they are four or five times less likely to win, and still hope to beat this odds.

I worry about odds. Apparently someone gets struck by lightning ten times a day. Who is this unlucky person, and are they OK? We should be told!

Only ever taken one whack myself. Must be safe now as it never strikes twice right?

jpoc

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#1224406 28-Jan-2015 22:40

You all know that the most dangerous part of any flight is the drive to the airport - right?

It's all utter BS of course.

The flight is thousands, perhaps even tens of thousands of times more likely to result in a fatal accident than the drive to the airport!

You can work this out for yourselves by considering that the problem is similar to the old question about piano tuners in Chicago.

TLD

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#1224489 29-Jan-2015 02:06

jpoc: You all know that the most dangerous part of any flight is the drive to the airport - right?

It's all utter BS of course.

The flight is thousands, perhaps even tens of thousands of times more likely to result in a fatal accident than the drive to the airport!

You can work this out for yourselves by considering that the problem is similar to the old question about piano tuners in Chicago.

I also wonder how they compile the stats. Say, for instance it is calculated on passenger miles, then with several hundred passengers in an aircraft traveling maybe six thousand miles, those stats will work out better than number of individual flights against aircraft crashes.

Trevor Dennis
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jpoc

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#1224503 29-Jan-2015 06:58

TLD:
jpoc: You all know that the most dangerous part of any flight is the drive to the airport - right?

It's all utter BS of course.

The flight is thousands, perhaps even tens of thousands of times more likely to result in a fatal accident than the drive to the airport!

You can work this out for yourselves by considering that the problem is similar to the old question about piano tuners in Chicago.

I also wonder how they compile the stats. Say, for instance it is calculated on passenger miles, then with several hundred passengers in an aircraft traveling maybe six thousand miles, those stats will work out better than number of individual flights against aircraft crashes.

That is part of it, they look at fatal accidents per passenger kilometer and a wide body jet going from here to LA is millions of passenger kms so they can make it look safe.

Obviously, if you look at fatal accidents per journey then the numbers are different and any given commercial flight is about 30 times more likely to result in a fatal accident than any given car trip.

But that is not the only distortion of the numbers. They are talking about the drive to the airport and not just any old car trip. Think about the fatal accidents that we see here. A drunk driver on the way home after a night out. A bunch of young men driving way too fast because they are invincible. Someone fleeing the cops. A tourist on the wrong side of the road, or falling asleep and missing a stop sign, or pulling a u turn on a busy road. Not one of those was a trip to the airport. I would suggest that your trip to the airport is way safer than those other trips, most likely at least 100 times safer which pushes the risk ratio up into the thousands.

SaltyNZ

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#1224527 29-Jan-2015 08:15

The fact that you don't have to share the air with a bunch of drunken idiots is definitely an advantage. There are a lot of other factors too.

A couple of years ago, a 777 landing at San Francisco came in too slowly (pilot error) and the tail clipped the sea wall. The plane slammed down onto the runway and broke into several pieces. If your car hit something at less than half the speed of a 777 landing (anything up to 285km/hr-ish), you would be a red stain on the wreckage. In fact, however, only 3 people died - and one of those was killed by an approaching fire truck. Commercial aircraft have far fewer accidents no matter whether you look at it on a per-trip or per-kilometre basis, and even when there is a serious accident, you're much more likely to survive it than you would in a car.

The reason it feels like air travel is dangerous is because of the way it is reported. A fatal car accident might be on the second or third page of the newspaper. They happen all the time: they're not news. But a plane crash that kills 250 people? Those are very rare, and we spend a lot of effort investigating each one to try make sure that whatever went wrong doesn't do it again. They're in the news for days or weeks. Globally, around 1,200 people (sorry, I wish I had a better source for that) died last year in commercial air crashes. 1,200 people, globally. Nearly 300 people died on the roads in 2014 just in New Zealand. It's not a question of skewing the numbers to make commercial flight look safer. It really, actually, is.

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jpoc

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#1224784 29-Jan-2015 15:47

SaltyNZ: The fact that you don't have to share the air with a bunch of drunken idiots is definitely an advantage. There are a lot of other factors too.

A couple of years ago, a 777 landing at San Francisco came in too slowly (pilot error) and the tail clipped the sea wall. The plane slammed down onto the runway and broke into several pieces. If your car hit something at less than half the speed of a 777 landing (anything up to 285km/hr-ish), you would be a red stain on the wreckage. In fact, however, only 3 people died - and one of those was killed by an approaching fire truck. Commercial aircraft have far fewer accidents no matter whether you look at it on a per-trip or per-kilometre basis, and even when there is a serious accident, you're much more likely to survive it than you would in a car.

The reason it feels like air travel is dangerous is because of the way it is reported. A fatal car accident might be on the second or third page of the newspaper. They happen all the time: they're not news. But a plane crash that kills 250 people? Those are very rare, and we spend a lot of effort investigating each one to try make sure that whatever went wrong doesn't do it again. They're in the news for days or weeks. Globally, around 1,200 people (sorry, I wish I had a better source for that) died last year in commercial air crashes. 1,200 people, globally. Nearly 300 people died on the roads in 2014 just in New Zealand. It's not a question of skewing the numbers to make commercial flight look safer. It really, actually, is.

Just as an aside - I've been in an accident in which the car that hit me was doing over 220kph. After it hit me, it slammed into another car so hard that the second car split into two parts. I walked away without a scratch and the other guy just got bad bruising from his seatbelt. No red stains anywhere - at least not until the young guy in the other car went home. He had been trying to see how fast daddy's new Mondeo would go on a downhill autobahn stretch.

Viewed on a per trip basis, commercial aircraft have many times more fatal accidents than cars.

The safest year on record for commercial aviation was 2012 with one fatal accident per 2.5 million flights. Auckland gets approx two fatal accidents per week from tens of millions of car trips.

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