Singapore Airlines Riotous event Which sadly left one person dead and one other hospitalized which has made lots of us think concerning the dangers of air travel.
We'll be hearing more in the approaching days about how the plane suddenly crashed en route from London to Singapore earlier this week, injuring passengers and crew before making an emergency landing in Thailand.
But thankfully, these sorts of events are rareand more Exceptional Compared to other kinds of transportation injuries.
So why will we sometimes think that the chance of injury while traveling by plane is higher than it actually is?
How common are concussive injuries?
Turbulence is due to Irregular air movement, leading to sudden sideways and vertical jolts to passengers and crew.
In the case of the Singapore Airlines flight, any such turbulence is taken into account a serious example of this.A flurry of clean air, which may occur by surprise. It has many other types.
About 25 in-flight concussion injuries It is reported to the Australian Transport Safety Bureau annually, although many are believed to be unreported. Some of those injuries are serious, including broken bones and head injuries. Passengers being thrown up and out of their seats during turbulence is probably the most common form of head injury on an airplane.
Other concussion injuries are brought on by contact with flying laptops or other unprotected objects.
I An example In a flurry of clear air that got here by surprise, cabin crew, passengers and food trolleys hit the roof, and fell back to the ground. Serious injuries include broken bones, bruises, neck and back strains, a dislocated shoulder and broken teeth. Almost all of those seriously injured weren't wearing their seat belts.
But we want to place it in perspective. In the yr January 2024, there have been More than 36 million Passengers on international flights to Australia. In the yr February 2024, there have been More than 58 million Passengers on domestic flights
So while such incidents grab the headlines, they're rare.
Why do we expect flying is more dangerous than it's?
When we hear about this recent Singapore Airlines incident, it's only natural to have a powerful emotional response. If we had been within the plane at the moment, we might need imagined the phobia we could have felt.
But our emotional response It changes our perception. about risk and leads us to think that these rare occurrences are more common than they really are.
Penguin Press
There is an in depth literature highlighting the various aspects that influence how individuals perceive risk and the cognitive biases that we're all susceptible to mislead us.
Nobel Prize winning economist Daniel Kahneman covers them in his best-selling book. Thinking, fast and slow.
He explains that the best way we reply to threats is just not rational, but driven by emotion. Kahneman also highlights the indisputable fact that our brains usually are not wired to perceive very small threats. So some of these risks – reminiscent of the potential of serious injury or death from in-flight turbulence – are difficult for us to grasp.
The more odd an event is, and this was a really unusual event, Kahneman says, the more impact it has on our psychology and the more likely we're to take that risk. will understand
Of course, the more odd event, To a great extent Its presence within the media only enhances this effect.
Likewise, it's easy Imagine an eventthe more it affects our perception and the more likely we're to answer an event as whether it is more prone to occur.
How can we sense danger?
One solution to understand activities with small, hard-to-understand risks is to match their risks to the risks of more familiar activities.
If we do, the info shows very clearly that it is just too high. More dangerous Driving a automotive or riding a motorbike as an alternative of traveling by plane.
While events just like the Singapore Airlines incident are devastating and evoke many emotions, it is vital to pay attention to how our emotions can mislead us into overestimating the chance of it happening again.
In addition to the stress and anxiety it provokes, overestimating the risks of certain activities can lead us to make poor decisions that really put us at greater risk of harm.