You should have been around in the 70s, when commercial passenger air travel really took off. There was a big accident pretty much every month in those days. There may have been a small peak in recent months but air travel is thousands of times safer today than forty years ago.

Goodness is what you do. Not who you pray to.

Yep. Remember going to Tenerife in '78 and the stewards asking everyone to put the blinds down on take off and landing. I peeked.

Wreckage from the two jumbo jets that had collided not long before was on the grass still. Only 550 dead.

That helped calm my 13 year old nerves on my first flight.

Big chest and massive boobs

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I can imagine that being the case in the 70s before standards and technology were advanced.

It's undeniably statistically a very safe way to travel and, as Kermit said, when you realise how many planes are up there at any given moment you're massively odds against to ever be one of the unfortunate ones.

Having said that since I moved abroad and started flying back and forth from England several times a year, I've become quite a nervous flyer and can't imagine many more terrifying ways to go.

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold...

We just hear about it quicker now, and news like this gets saturated through the 24hr news channels, repeated every 15minutes.

Life is a lottery of all manner of terrible, amusing and absurd ways to die, and if you don't win the accidental / deliberate death sweepstakes, the cost of participation if death by disease.

The advantage of a plane crash is it'll be quick, and you won't have to worry about living with terrible injuries (usually). The downside is that despite what they say, most people are still alive when they hit the ground (even when the plane has been blown up - explosions on planes are relatively small, as you don't really need to do too much damage to bring a plane down - physics tends to take care of the rest).

The game of life, everyone loses in the end. Its basically about trying to stay alive long enough for natural causes to win.

"One Nation Under God, has turned into One Nation Under the Influence of One Drug"
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My suspicion would be that its the standards, and safety technology driven by standards that makes the difference, rather than the technology.

Back in the 70s society in general seemed to be somewhat more blasé about mortality, death and serious injury. We've seen massive improvements in terms of motoring accidents by focusing, not so much on new technology, as focusing on the driver.

You don't really hear about those horrific motorway pile ups of yester year anymore. Probably because people are more focused on things like 'safety, not drinking and paying attention' when in a metal coffin travelling at 80 mph, surrounded by other metal coffins.

Safety measures and technology take some of the credit, but in driving, as with Air Traffic, I suspect that a large part of the difference is in 'more responsible people'.

As a kid, my dad who was an AA Sponsor, seemed to know a frightening large number of commercial pilots.

"One Nation Under God, has turned into One Nation Under the Influence of One Drug"
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