you are much more likely to die eating a
nice meal than you are in a plane crash
that being said it happens at a rate of
about one fatal accident per two and a
half million flights and half of those
accidents occur during one very short
phase of the trip want to know when you
should be the most nervous on your next
flight keep your seatbelts fastened and
get ready for a bumpy ride takeoff and
landing are widely considered to the
most dangerous parts of a flight but
that's only partially true let's take a
look at this chart boeing keeps track of
fatal commercial jet accidents every
year and categorizes those accidents by
when they occur during the flight boeing
breaks down the average one and a half
hour flight into eight phases but we'll
just be looking at these five starting
at the beginning the take-off and
initial climb this phase takes up only
2% of the entire flight but it accounts
for 14% of fatal accidents which might
not seem like a lot until we look at the
cruising phase a plane cruises for more
than half of the one and a half hour
trip but only eleven percent of fatal
accidents happen during this chunk so
that leaves the final descent and
landing they take up about 4% of the
average flight lasting twice as long as
take off an initial climb but a whopping
forty nine percent of fatal accidents
occur in this short window making the
final descent and landing the deadliest
part of an average flight so what's
going on here
typically on takeoff and typically on
landing the aircraft is what we would
call low and slow and when problems
happen you don't have a lot of time to
actually react when they're cruising at
36,000 feet a pilot has the luxury of
time and space to course-correct
even if both engines go out the plane
won't just fall out of the sky
it becomes a glider in this state a
typical airliner loses about a mile and
altitude for every 10 it moves forward
giving the pilot a little over eight
minutes to find a place to land but if
something goes wrong on the ground that
window shrinks considerably for a
typical commercial jet takeoff lasts
only 30 to 35 seconds if an engine fails
or the landing gear jams the pilot has
almost no time at all to decide whether
to take off anyway or to try and wrestle
a 175,000 pound
metal beast to the ground rejected
takeoffs are rare because when you're
blasting down their runway to over 100
miles per hour things are happening
really quickly the decision to reject
the takeoff is a very intense decision
because you have to do it below a
certain speed otherwise via physics
you're you're not going to get stopped
if the plane hasn't taken off or stopped
by this point it's going off the end of
the runway which depending on the
airport could mean sliding into an open
field or off a literal cliff like at
Colorado's Telluride Regional Airport
its runway is terrifyingly sandwiched
between two 1000 foot drops for
dangerous runways like Telluride
airports will install an engineered
materials arrestor system an EMAS is a
bed of materials at the end of a runway
designed to collapse under the weight of
an airplane gripping its tires and
ideally bringing it to a stop before it
plummets 1,000 feet off a ledge it works
similarly for a landing gone wrong so
what is it about touching down that
makes it so much more dangerous than
taking off oversimplified it's easier to
make a plane fly than it is to make it
stop
we're slowing down and we're getting the
aircraft down to the ground and since
you're already slow any any wind effect
or anything like that could have more
dramatic impact than it would on takeoff
during a normal landing the pilot is
communicating with air traffic control
lining up with the proper runway and
informing the crew similar to takeoff
but all while flying toward the ground
instead of away sometimes it's a normal
landing where everything is going well
and something happens at the last second
and it leads to an accident in other
situations there's already an emergency
on board the aircraft which is already
complicated to landing and then they
land and something unfortunately goes
wrong statistics can be scary but they
still say flying is the safest way to
travel and even if an accident were to
happen on your next flight you'd have a
ninety five point seven percent chance
of surviving it
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