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WS MoreOrLess: Fear of Flying
00:09:37
After three tragic airline incidents in eight days, is flying becoming more dangerous?...
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This is the short edition of More or Less, first broadcast on the BBC World Service.
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Thank you for downloading from the BBC. For details of our complete range of podcasts and our terms of use, go to bbcworldservice.com podcasts. Flower of Scotland, welcoming you to another edition of More or Less on the BBC World Service, I'm Wesley Stevenson. It comes as the world, well, some of the world at least, has been focused on Glasgow for the Commonwealth Games, which, for those of you in the two thirds of the world that aren't competing, is a kind of mini Olympics for countries who were once in the British Empire. Now, it might sound a bit niche to those not involved, but whether sport, there's numbers. And we wondered who was the most successful Commonwealth nation. Canada. Australia? India, Perhaps not even close. But I'm not going to tell you who it is yet. You'll have to wait. First, there's been a tragic period of airline crashes. In the space of just eight days, three commercial airliners have been involved in accidents with the deaths of 462 people. The first, the Malaysian Airlines flight MH17, was believed to have been shot out of the sky by a missile when it was flying over Ukraine on 17 July. Just six days later, a Transasia airline flight crashed in Taiwan. And just a day after that, an Air Algerie flight crashed in Mali. Now, you'd be forgiven for feeling a bit nervous about boarding a flight since these incidents. And this terrible cluster of accidents brings air travel into. Into sharp focus. But should we be surprised at three crashes happening in such a short period of time? Sir David Spiegelhalter is the Winton professor for the Understanding of Risk at Cambridge University in the uk.
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Well, first of all, we can consider a particular period of eight days, say between July 17 and July 25. And we can work out that the chance of having three crashes in that period is around a one in a thousand chance. I mean, very rare indeed. It would be extremely small indeed. But that's the chance of it happening in that particular window, which isn't really what we're interested in. We want to know, you know, what's the chance of getting a cluster such as that over a longer period, say, 10 years or so. So we could look at the fact that There are about 458 day windows over those 10 years, and the chance of getting at least three crashes in one of those windows is about 40%. But in fact, of course, we're not even interested in that. We're interested in some moving eight day window, you know, over the whole 10 years. And if we take that into account, chance goes to about 60%. So I would say that given the underlying risk of air travel at the moment, on average, that every 10 years, there's a 60% chance of getting three crashes in eight days. It's not actually very surprising at all, but still very, very eerie and very unpleasant.
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And this is true of all random events. Whether it be air accidents, incidences of leukemia in children, or the times of day the babies are born, they won't be evenly distributed, and you will always get clusters. It's a theory of probability that's known as the Poisson distribution. That is, if there are lots of opportunities for something to occur which only rarely happens, like a plane crash, it's actually more probable there'll be a short time between events. So we should expect clusters. And we can't get away from the fact that crashes will happen. But let's put this into context. Arnold Barnett is a professor of statistics at MIT in the United States, and he's also worked in aviation safety for 35 years.
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Roughly speaking, if you were to board a flight at random in the traditional First World, the chance that the flight will end a disaster for you and you'll wind up dying in an aviation accident is about 1 in 25 million. Now, to make that statistic more intuitively accessible, we might think in Britain, if you see a child, for example, at Heathrow or Manchester Airport, that child is far more likely to grow up to be the Prime Minister than to perish in the forthcoming flight. So we're talking about an extraordinarily low risk, and one would have to travel actually something like 60,000 years, taking one flight a day before, on average, the odds would go up and the person would perish in an aviation accident.
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But is the safety record getting worse? So far, 761 people have died in passenger airline accidents this year, which is nearly three times as many as 2013 and more than in 2012 and 2011. But you need to look at the bigger picture, says Professor Barnett.
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These numbers, if you actually looked at the historical pattern, they bounce around quite a bit, as you would expect, by the way, under the Poisson distribution, it's a large number in isolation, 700. But you have to consider out of how many, and when you do that, you're talking one out of many million. In the first world, Flying today is something like a factor of 100 safer than it was a little over half a century ago, you know, when aviation was closer to its birth. You know, sometimes in the United States, people are nostalgic for the golden age of aviation and the wonderful meals you could get on board. Well, the meals were more elegant those days, to be sure, but the chance that it would be your last supper was something like 100 times the risk today.
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And it's less risky to fly than it is to travel by car or rail, and much less risky than travelling by motorbike. But this doesn't stop people being scared, though. I mean, even David Spiegelhalter and Arnold Barnett both admitted to me that they're both nervous fliers. So take some comfort that even the experts aren't always helped by the hard facts. And the sad thing is, although your chance of being killed in a plane crash is very, very small, the chances that someone will be killed in any one year is probably pretty close to 100%. Back to the Commonwealth Games. They might be missing the likes of the usa, Russia, China and most of Europe. And it may not have all the sports of the Olympics and it may include lawn bowls and netball, but there are still bragging rights to be determined about who has done the best over the years. Now, obviously you could just draw up an all time medal table, but this seems a little unfair because some countries like England and Canada are a lot bigger than say, Jamaica or Tuvalu. So my colleague from BBC Sport, Ian Shoesmith, has been looking at a fairer way of grading the Commonwealth Games countries.
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What we thought we'd do for each of the Commonwealth Games since 1990, so six editions with the Games being held every four years, we worked out an average population for each country and then we looked at the medals table for each of those six Commonwealth Games and we thought, let's give three points for a gold medal, two points for a silver medal and, and one point for a bronze medal. To work out a concept called medal points. Then what we ended up doing was dividing the population by medal points and then we'd have a faro league table.
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And what happens when you do that?
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It's amazing, really. Gone are the big countries. We found that by far and away the most successful nation per capita was Nauru, not far from Australia. Well, I say not far. It's about a six hour flight from Brisbane to the northeast, population 10,000. But people on that island are incredibly strong and they punch way above their weight.
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So what are they good at?
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Weightlifting. The typical Nauruan is not the tallest of people, but boy are they strong. I've been speaking to one guy who really put the island on the map, a fellow called Marcus Stephen, who went on to become the island's president. He's only about 5 foot 3. He competed in the 62 kilogram category at the Commonwealth Games, and yet he was able to lift around about 172kg, nearly three times his own body weight. And in other terms, it's the equivalent of Lionel Messi lifting one of the Klitschko brothers plus Manny Pacquiao over his head at the same time. It's truly, truly staggering. And what this guy did, he put the island really on the map. Until 1990, Nauru had never competed in the Commonwealth Games. They weren't even registered. He had to go about lobbying the authorities to get Nauru admitted and he competed in 1990 and he went on to win a whole host of medals. And since then, nauru have won 28 medals, including 10 golds, and all of them have come in weightlifting.
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Interestingly, Nehru have only actually won one medal at these Games, but their place at the top of the table is still assured because they've got a huge lead. And you'll be able to see an updated table once the Games are over. On the BBC website now. Thanks for listening. Please do get in touch if you have any numbers you want us to look into and you can email us at more or lessbc.co.uk. and previous editions of the programme are available at bbcworldservice.com more or less. There are dozens of different podcasts now available from the BBC, including news, documentaries, science, business, arts and sports. For details of them all, go to bbcworldservice.com podcasts.