The Singapore Airlines turbulence incident that has sadly left one person dead and others hospitalised has made a lot of us think in regards to the risks of air travel.
We’ll hear more in coming days about how the aircraft got here to drop so suddenly on its route from London to Singapore earlier this week, injuring passengers and crew, before making an emergency landing in Thailand.
But thankfully, these kinds of incidents are rareand far less-common than injuries from other forms of transport.
So why can we sometimes think the danger of getting injured while travelling by plane is higher than it truly is?
How common are turbulence injuries?
Turbulence is brought on by the irregular movement of air, resulting in passengers and crew experiencing abrupt sideways and vertical jolts.
In the case of the Singapore Airlines flight, this kind of turbulence is considered a severe example of “clear-air turbulence”, which may occur all at once. There are several other types.
About 25 in-flight turbulence injuries are reported to the Australian Transport Safety Bureau every year, even though it is believed many more are un-reported. Some of those reported injuries are serious, including broken bones and head injuries. Passengers being thrown up and out of their seat during turbulence is one of the crucial common kind of head injury on a plane.
Other injuries from turbulence are brought on by contact with flying laptops, or other unsecured items.
In one example of clear-air turbulence that got here all at once, cabin crew, passengers and meal trolleys hit the ceiling, and landed heavily back on the ground. Serious injuries included bone fractures, lacerations, neck and back strains, a dislocated shoulder and shattered teeth. Almost all of those seriously injured didn’t have their seat belts fastened.
But we want to place this into perspective. In the 12 months to January 2024, there have been greater than 36 million passengers on international flights to Australia. In the 12 months to February 2024, there have been greater than 58 million passengers on domestic flights.
So while such incidents grab the headlines, they’re exceedingly rare.
Why do we predict flying is riskier than it’s?
When we hear about this recent Singapore Airlines incident, it’s entirely natural to have a robust emotional response. We may need imagined the phobia we’d feel if we were on the aircraft on the time.
But our emotional response alters our perception of the danger and leads us to think these rare incidents are more common than they are surely.
Penguin Press
There is an enormous body of literature addressing the various aspects that influence how individuals perceive risk and the cognitive biases we’re all subject to that mislead us.
Nobel Prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman covers them in his bestselling book Thinking, Fast and Slow.
He describes the way in which we reply to risks isn’t rational, but driven by emotion. Kahneman also highlights the indisputable fact that our brains will not be wired to make sense of extremely small risks. So these kinds of risks – similar to the prospect of great injury or death from in-flight turbulence – are hard for us to make sense of.
The more odd an event is, and this was a really unusual event, Kahneman says the more impact it makes on our psyche and the more likely we’re to overestimate the danger.
Of course, the more odd the event, the more likely it’s for it to be within the media, amplifying this effect.
Similarly, the simpler it’s to imagine an eventthe more it affects our perception and the more likely we’re to reply to an event as if it were far more more likely to occur.
How can we make sense of the danger?
One technique to make sense of activities with small, hard-to-understand risks is by comparing their risks to the risks of more familiar activities.
If we do that, the information shows very clearly that it is way more dangerous to drive a automotive or ride a motorcycle than to travel by plane.
While events similar to the Singapore Airlines incident are devastating and fire up a lot of emotions, it’s essential to recognise how our emotions can mislead us to over-estimate the danger of this happening again, or to us.
Apart from the stress and anxiety this provokes, overestimating the risks of particular activities may lead us to make bad decisions that really put us at greater risk of harm.
