Lesson 2: Airplanes and Outside Influences
Lesson 2 is about the plane and many of the outside influences that occur during a flight. This lesson will include a little about how the plane flies, why it won't fall from the sky, built in safety procedures, and more.
Introduction
I’m sure you’ve heard it numerous times – flying is the safest way to travel. Ask any pilot what the most dangerous part of the trip is and he’ll look you right in the eye and say “the ride to the airport”.
Flying is not 100% safe; things do happen – rarely, but nothing is perfect. Still, flying is the safest way to travel and safer than many things we do daily.
According to Duane Brown in Flying Without Fear, the FAA estimates nearly 100,000 people are in the skies over the United States during daylight each day. Approximately ten million flights take off and land in the U.S. and one and a half million in Canada each year.
In Conquering Your Fear of Flying, Maeve Byrne Crangle tells us that in a visit to Boeing in Seattle, she was advised that a Boeing airliner takes off or lands somewhere in the world every 2 ½ seconds. There are millions of people flying safely every day.
Captain Glen Burns of Air Canada, told us in his program that “you would have to board a commercial airliner every day for 26,000 years before you would be involved in a major accident and even then it may not be fatal.”
Unfortunately, when there is an accident, it’s sensationalized in the media. Things can occasionally go wrong, but it takes a lot of freak circumstances combined to make that happen. We hear about the tragic flights for days and weeks on end, but rarely hear about other more common statistics. For instance:
From 1989 – 1993
- 222,000 died in highway accidents
- 120,000 people were murdered
- 105,000 died from accidents in the home
- 47,000 died from accidents on the job
- 15,000 died from choking while eating
- 4,000 died in bicycle accidents
- 3,000 died at railroad crossings
- 414 people died in major AND commuter airline accidents 1
- 400 died in animal drawn vehicle
Imagine a plane flying the equivalent of 45,000 round trips to the moon. That’s what the Boeing 747 has done since 1970. Over 2.2 billion passengers have made those trips safely.
The maximum takeoff weight of a Boeing 767 – 400ER is 450,000 pounds. Its overall length is 201 feet, 4 inches and its wing span is 170 feet, 4 inches. The tail height alone is 55 feet, 4 inches. It typically cruises at 35,000 feet high at a speed of 530 miles per hour. 2
You don’t have to be afraid to fly to wonder how something that enormous and heavy can stay up in the air. But it can and in this lesson, you'll get an idea of how.
Is there risk involved in flying? Yes, of course. But flying on a large, well established airline is a very low risk. You’ll see in this lesson how strong planes are. You’ll learn about all the redundant systems from the plane itself to the pilots. You’ll see how commercial aviation is built upon layers of safety and regulation and how it’s enforced.
Captain Burns also tells us that we can lower the risk by choosing to fly in world class airlines, which are statistically safer than airlines from Third World countries with developing economies. Yet even those airlines are safer than driving.
The important thing to learn from this lesson is that though nothing is perfect, flying has very high standards, intense training, strict regulations, backup systems galore, and most of all, in this lesson we’ll explore just how a plane does stay up in the air and why the word “near miss” is overused.
If we want to live risk free, we have to stop doing things altogether. And even then, just by staying at home, there’s still a risk. Several years ago there was a horrible tragedy in Toronto. A woman was killed in her home while doing her laundry when a truck veered out of control and crashed into her house. Risk is everywhere and flying is very low risk.
I don't want to stop riding in cars, walking, bicycling, eating, or living normally -- do you?
1 Reminder: this course is about major commercial airlines, not small commuter planes or airlines from countries with lower safety standards than the U.S., Britain, Australia, Canada, etc.
2 Boeing Web Site – Technical Specs on Commercial Planes
