How to walk away from a plane crash

When Flight 1459 made a dramatic landing in the Hudson River last month, all 155 passengers and crew famously survived. But the US aviation industry had no time to brace itself when only weeks later Flight 3407 crashed in a ball of flames in Buffalo, New York State killing every one of the 49 passengers and crew on board. Then this week Flight 1951 began to break apart as it tried to land in Amsterdam's Schiphol airport. Nine people died but of the 135 on board, 126 survived.

Numerically speaking, the rates of survival from these three terrifying plane crashes read as follows: 155/155, 0/50 and 126/135. In other words, the most recent evidence supports a remarkable plane crash statistic – that aviation disasters have an astonishing 95.7 per cent survival rate. That's according to research done by the US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) which goes on to say that excluding disasters where nobody had a chance (the likes of Lockerbie and September 11) even in "serious" accidents the survival rate is upwards of 75 per cent. "Contrary to public perception," states the NTSB, "the most likely outcome of an accident is that most of the occupants survived."

Not only are your chances of dying in airline disaster an encouraging one in 11 million, but should your plane be one of the miniscule percentage that do crash every year, the chances are you'll be telling reporters all about it the following day.

Almost invariably, the subsequent reports are given headlines like 'Miracle on the Hudson' and of course plane crashes make great front pages (which is why terrorists regularly target airliners).

Each new story contributes to an unwarranted aura of terror that still surrounds air travel. To make matters worse though to use the word 'miracle' is to deny the skill and training not only of pilots and air crew but also of plane builders and those who develop the in-flight safety cards most people choose to ignore.

People survive plane crashes not because of miracles, but because of testingThe 'Miracle on the Hudson' headline for example initially concealed the fact that a highly-skilled former fighter pilot named Chelsey 'Sully' Sullenburger had used over 40 years of flying experience to perform a perfect 'splash-landing'. It was not thanks to a miracle that everyone survived the Hudson crash, but thanks to exhaustive testing dating back to the 1930s that has resulted in planes designed to be capable of landing in water being flown by pilots, like Sully, who know that to make such a landing the entry speed must be slow, the landing gear retracted, the wing flaps down and the nose of the plane pointing up.

Likewise, the death toll in the Schiphol disaster would have been far worse if it were not for aviation laws introduced in the 1980s which demanded that planes should be less susceptible to bursting into flames and built of materials strong