Name: Why They Say Airplanes Are Safer Than Cars
Uploaded: 2020-03-12T03:11:04.000Z
Duration: 10 min 5 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

If you think about it, what could be more frightful than whizzing through the air at

over 500 miles per hour in a big pressurized aluminum tube, 6 miles up, where the air outside

Adverbs of degree

is too thin to breathe, and the temperature is lower than -40 F?

Any one of these things is dangerous by itself, and commercial flights include them all at

No wonder thousands of people are afraid of flying.

They’re only protected by a thin metal skin!

The good news is that statistics are on the side of aviation.

They prove that airplanes are the safest means of travel.

Airlines tell us that it's a thousand times safer to fly than to drive, and the most dangerous

part of your trip is on the way to the airport.

Well, let's check out the figures and make our own conclusions.

Airplanes around the world make 138 thousand flights a day.

48 million flights a year transport 5 billion passengers.

Only one airplane crash happens per about every 16 million flights on average, and about

500 people don’t survive in all the crashes that happen in a year.

So pencil that out and you’ll find that there’s 1 chance in 10 million of not making

In comparison, about 1.5 million people will be in a car crash and not walk away from it

Road Crash Statistics says that about 3,300 people lose their lives in car crashes daily.

Apart from that, 20 to 50 million people get injured in car crashes every year.

Headshakers can contradict that this comparison isn’t valid, because there are many more

cars in the world than planes, and the total distance they drive is much longer than that

But still, if you make super complex calculations of miles per passenger, a plane will be safer

There's a myth that there're no chances of surviving a plane crash, but it has little

Airplanes are being constructed by people who are experts at aerodynamics and gravitational

There’ve been 568 airplane accidents in the US between 1983 and 2000.

The number of people who didn’t survive was only 5% of all the passengers who were

Even if we don’t take into account minor accidents, and take only serious crashes that

involve hitting the ground, damaging the plane’s fuselage, and fire, the number of people who

Private jets are less safe than commercial ones, because there are fewer safety precautions,

and the pilots don't have to go through such strict screening.

Another popular belief is that travelling by railroad is the safest means of transport;

but statistics reveal that the number of train crashes is much more frequent than in aviation.

It's just that they don't cause as many casualties and don’t get as much media coverage.

Any plane crash, even involving a small jet, immediately attracts media attention.

Air catastrophes always hit the news and are discussed long after.

There’ll be dozens of accounts, expert opinions, photographs of the crash area, and discussions

It all leads to the negative opinion that aviation is a very dangerous means of transport.

And yet, investigations of plane crashes confirm that they usually happen due to coincidental

combinations of very rare circumstances, which almost never happen at the same time.

This means that if a passenger boards a random flight every day, statistically, it'd take

them 21,000 years to get into an aircrash.

The chances of survival are much higher if the plane crash- lands on water, even if it's

Specialists say that ditching boosts the chances for survival by 50%.

The 2 most common fears that passenger have on board the plane are engine failure and

Let’s see if there’s actually anything to be afraid of.

Many people think that if an engine breaks down, the plane will plummet to earth.

The truth is that the engines aren’t exactly what keeps the plane going.

The name itself, air & plane, hints at its ability to glide through the air.

When an object soars through the air at a high speed, a zone of high pressure appears

The faster the speed is, the stronger the pressure will be.

If both engines break down in the air, which almost never happens, inertia won’t allow

It’ll lower slowly and gradually as it continues to move forward.

In such a situation, the plane can glide for 50 minutes.

Do you think you could drive a car if it had a broken engine?

If you imagine that the air is like a cake with many layers, these layers will have different

Air isn’t uniform; it consists of different gases.

Warmer layers move upwards, and colder ones downwards.

That’s why there’re no “air bumps”, as you might imagine them; the plane just

Say, after take off, when the plane has risen, the autopilot lowers the engine thrust.

You can also feel as if you’re falling when the plane straightens out at a certain height.

In fact, it’s just rising its tail to the same level as the nose.

When the plane goes through layers of air of different density, it can start vibrating.

You could compare it to a car driving on a bumpy road.

You might be angry that the road is bad, but you don’t think your life is at risk, right?

Sometimes turbulence can happen when the sky is clear, or there are few high-level clouds.

It’s more difficult to detect beforehand, and in this case, the pilot won’t have a

chance to ask you to stay in your seat before the plane gets into a turbulent zone.

It’s much more predictable when it’s cloudy and the plane flies above the sea or mountains.

The pilot will turn on special lights and tell the passengers to fasten seat belts and

Have you ever experienced severe turbulence?

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Why They Say Airplanes Are Safer Than Cars

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