Flying somewhere? Then please don't read on

Just when I'm packing my bag for the flight home, a daily feature arrives in the inbox. It offers an article entitled, Terrifying Things That Will (Probably) Never Happen to You, and before I click on it, I know it's going to list a great worry of the moment.

And it does. 'If you've ever flown in an airplane, you've probably wondered just

how likely a crash is,' the article begins, and thankfully adds, 'not very likely at all'.

Interesting, encouraging in a way, but who could fly the way we do these days and not realise that the amazing possibility of flying just about anywhere in exceedingly swift time comes with a mighty great risk.

If things should go wrong, you and the vast crowd all stuck in our seats for hours on end have not a chance of surviving.

That missing flight

We have only to recall that missing flight of the Malaysia Airlines, flight 370, and I have the unofficial script of what apparently happened. It's not happy reading, particularly when you're about to take to the skies yourself. In my case, just under 24 hours of it up there in two steps.

The stirrer of nerves came from the The ThoughtCo newsletter – well recommended, I might say, except for this one which is very close to the mark.

However, it reassures, 'Probably the number one fear on most peoples' list, dying in a plane crash, is so statistically unlikely and yet so deeply terrifying, that it merits a hard, cold analysis of the facts.

'Every day, around the world, there are well over 100,000 airplane flights …

'In 2016, there was an average of about one fatal accident for every five million flights, for a total of 271 fatalities —putting your odds of death by plane crash at one in 11 million for any given trip. (By way of comparison, in the US alone, about 40,000 people died in car crashes in 2016), reports ThoughtCo.

Sucked out of plane window

What a relief, at least in a way, only of course it would be this week that a really ghastly accident happened up there.

The Independent reported, 'A passenger who died after being partially sucked out of a shattered plane window …
Continues on the blogs for my ocean adventure book, Sailing to Purgatory, at SailingToPurgatory.com