Can You Imagine How Safe Flying Really Is?

I want to introduce you to Alex Gervash. Alex is a pilot and a therapist. He invented an amazing app. When flying, it would tell you when turbulence was about to start and how long it would last.

At the time he developed and marketed that app, Alex lived with his wife, a Russian, in Moscow. When the war with Ukraine started, they left Russia and now live in France. Alex was not able to move the app.

Alex has worked with thousands of anxious fliers. You can book a counseling session with him at this link.

He just posted something amazing on his Facebook page.

Alex wrote the following:

Currently 24000 flights are tracked up in the air. It sets a new air traffic world record. But, as long as it is not a crash - it doesn’t make headlines.

Nobody says, ‘Wow, how amazing it is — they all arrive safely, moving at 800 km/h, in three dimensions, often without seeing anything outside, with all that fuel, weather, and traffic.’
And yet — it’s safe. Every single moment. 90 million flights every year.
How easily we take the most incredible things for granted…
And how angry and frustrated we become when it’s not 100.00% — but merely 99.99999999%.

Last week I wrote about MIT statistics professor Arnold Barnett’s opinion that if we try to conceptualize how unlikely it is that our plane will crash, we will not be able to get it right.

Ability to conceptualize numbers varies. The Piraha people who live in the Amazon cannot conceptualize exact amounts. Their language doesn’t have words like, one, two, three, etc. Instead they have a word which means a small size or a small amount, a word that means a somewhat larger amount, and a word that means many.

A person who teaches statistics might be able to accurately conceptualize the amazingly small risk of flying. But most of us cannot represent the small risk accurately. Try as we might, we will exaggerate the risk. Though the risk is not really zero, the closest we can come to representing the risk in our mind is to think of flying as absolutely safe.

And when you look at that image Alex posted, zero begins to make sense.