How to assess risk in light of tragedies
Why the recent crash in Washington D.C. shouldn't dissuade you from flying
The other day as I’m driving I see a car ahead of me in traffic weaving all over the place. When I catch up to the car, I look over and see its driver eating a Cup o' Noodles. While driving. One hand holding the cup, the other hand shoveling noodles into his mouth. I don’t how he was steering (I don’t want to know), but it's a miracle he didn't cause an accident.
Over my many years of driving, I’ve seen several serious collisions happen right in front of me. Every single time it involved someone doing something really stupid. Turning left into oncoming traffic, driving way too fast, driving drunk. We know people like this are behind the wheel, and we know that every year tens of thousands of Americans die in car accidents, but we're so inured to the risks of driving that most of us get on the road every day without a second thought.
Now, let’s talk air travel. Given recent events, a lot of people are wondering if it’s safe to travel on an airplane. The last time there was an airline crash in the U.S. was in February of 2009 when a Colgan Air plane crashed into a house near Buffalo, New York, killing 50 people. Between February of 2009 and January of 2025, there were no air disasters in the U.S. despite the fact that there were an estimated 262 million commercial flights in that time. (Calculated from roughly 45,000 flights per day over the span of 16 years.) That means air travel in the U.S. is unbelievably safe. It’s so safe that you actually have higher odds of dying by rolling out of your bed at night than you do dying in an airline crash. And yet fear of flying is a serious issue. So serious that 1 in 3 Americans is afraid to fly, myself included.
Why are we so terrified to travel in the safest way possible but unafraid to participate in what seems like the Wild West that is the American car culture? It’s a question worth considering, because even those who are usually not part of the one-third of fearful flyers may be shaken by freak events like the recent tragedy in Washington D.C. Many people are so shaken by these incidents that, even if they weren’t fearful before, they begin to fret about air travel. I’ve known some who were unable to get on a plane for months, even years, following such events.
The Science of Fear
Canadian public policy commentator, Dan Gardner, talks about fear and our assessment of risk in his book, The Science of Fear. He noted that in the wake of 9/11, Americans were deeply unsettled about flying, and understandably so. Many feared that more terror attacks were imminent, and so they opted to drive instead of fly that year. Gardner points out how that decision led to thousands more vehicular deaths in 2001 than otherwise would’ve happened.
We know that driving is HUGELY less regulated than flying. Just about anyone with a pulse can get a driver’s license, and there are untold numbers of unlicensed people on the road. We’re all mostly on the honor system, because nobody is out there directing traffic. The result is that tens of thousands of people die on U.S. roads every single year because of drivers who eat Cup o' Noodles behind the wheel, or who are bad at spacial reasoning, or who are distracted or drunk or asleep. If you look at the numbers, you’re tens of million of times more likely to die someday in a car crash than in an airline crash. But we still get in our cars every day and off we go.
Gardner discusses the mechanisms of fear to explain why people tend to fear flying more than driving despite the statistical evidence showing that flying is much safer. Let’s have a look at them.
Familiarity vs. novelty: Driving is a familiar activity for most of us. We engage in it daily or frequently, which normalizes the risk. In contrast, flying is less common for the average person, making it seem more novel and thus more frightening.
Control: When driving, individuals feel they have control over the vehicle, the route, and the speed. In an airplane, passengers must relinquish control to the pilots, which can increase anxiety due to the perceived loss of autonomy. This is certainly true in my case. Control is a big deal.
Media coverage: Aviation accidents, although rare, receive extensive media coverage due to their dramatic nature and the high number of casualties involved. This disproportionate attention can skew public perception of the risk. Car accidents, while more frequent, are often seen as mundane or local news unless they’re particularly sensational.
Immediacy of risk perception: Car accidents are often seen as something that happens to others due to recklessness or bad luck, not systemic risk. I’m not the moron eating a full Thanksgiving dinner from the driver’s seat or getting in the car with a drunk, so I don’t worry about it. Airplane crashes, however, are perceived as catastrophic events where everyone on board is at risk, which amplifies the fear.
Psychology of probability: Most people are not good at intuitively understanding probability, especially when it comes to low-probability, high-impact events like plane crashes. Gardner notes that people tend to overestimate the likelihood of rare, dramatic events.
Imagery and visualization: This is a big one. The vivid, catastrophic imagery associated with plane crashes (fire, explosions) can evoke a stronger emotional response than the more common but less dramatic imagery associated with car accidents. And actually seeing videos all over social media of an airliner explode and plunge hundreds of feet into an icy river is going to make a huge emotional impact.
Risk compensation: Gardner might argue that people adjust their behavior based on perceived risk. Since driving feels safer (due to control and familiarity), people might engage in riskier behaviors like speeding, not wearing seatbelts, engaging in distracting activities while driving, which in turn keeps the actual risk of driving high.
Gardner's overall point is that, when viewed through the lens of statistics, our fears are not always rational, but heavily influenced by psychological, social, and media-driven factors.
Ironically, one reason we’ve made peace with the dangers of driving is because we know it’s a risky form of travel. We’ve just accepted it, because driving is mundane. Even car accidents seem mundane—unless they involve several cars or unusual circumstances, they barely rate a mention in the local news. But I guarantee if we got driving fatalities down to just one every ten years, every fatal car accident would become a traumatizing news event that would have people opting to walk.
Overcoming Fear
So what do we do when it seems like fear is paralyzing us? I know for me, it has resulted in my neglecting to visit many people I love who live far away. But we’re not supposed to indulge that fear. (I’m talking to myself here as much as I am to you.) God is aware that we are all tempted by fear, but he also gives us a way out:
For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind. —2 Timothy 1:7 [emphasis added]
First, the rational part of our brain (sound mind) needs to speak louder (power) than the emotional part. Events like the recent tragedy in D.C. get seared into our consciousness by our emotions, and for a reason: it's an in-built part of our survival mechanism. If dangerous events didn’t get our attention, that would negatively impact our survival. But rationality has to win. Yes, tragedies happen. But even in light of what happened in Washington D.C., you still have astonishingly low odds—1 in 39 million based on recent data—of being involved in something like that, which is as close to zero risk as you can get. Put another way, you’d have to fly on a commercial jet every single day for over 100,000 years before you could reasonably expect something terrible to happen.
We can be shocked that a terrible tragedy occurred last week and grieve the loss of life, but we're also obligated to put it in perspective. Air travel is still, by far, the safest way to go. If you need to get on a plane in the near future and you feel concerned, just know that your chances of arriving at your destination safely are 99.99999% as long as you wear your seatbelt.
If those statistics don’t make you feel better and you’re still fearful about flying, this is where love comes in. Former airline pilot and licensed therapist, Capt. Tom Bunn, has cracked the code on flying anxiety, and it has to do with what’s called “empathic attunement”—tapping into the feeling of an emotionally-secure connection with someone. To help anxious flyers, he’s developed the highly-successful SOAR program, which I’ve used in the past to fly when I have to.1 You can also check out his highly-rated books on Amazon.
And remember what Jesus promises:
Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid. —John 14:27
The SOAR program really does work. The only hitch is that if you stop flying for a long time, the anxiety can return. When I was flying regularly, my anxiety was completely gone. But I haven’t flown in years, so I’ll have to work through the program to start flying again.