Relax buddy, you are more likely to die on a boda boda than a plane

PHOTO | FILE FILE A Kenya Airways aircraft E-190 Embraer from Brazil is showered by fire engines on its arrival in the Country at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport on June 1, 2011 from Brazil.

What you need to know:

  • The steady flow of news stories on terrorism in our media ends up making us overestimate our chances of one of us dying in an act of terror.
  • Locally, the national carrier, Kenya Airways, has had only two fatal accidents in 34 years. The company has flown close to 30 million passengers with only 114 fatalities in the past 10 years.

THE MEDIA makes us overestimate the risk of misfortune happening. We deal in telling you about the new, which, more often than not, means rare.  Something appears on the front page because it is not that common. We in the ink-and-newsreel trade are, by nature, enthusiastic doom mongers. The unusual is good for business. It is new, deadly, and newsworthy.

The steady flow of news stories on terrorism in our media ends up making us overestimate our chances of one of us dying in an act of terror.

Because terrorism is made more visible than, say malaria, you have people who are more afraid of Abdi the Somali immigrant than the mosquito. Terrorism struggles to kill people in the low hundreds, malaria kills in tens of thousands.

So a plane disappeared in mysterious circumstances. It has been in the news and in the papers, on social media and the internet. What are the chances that the next plane you board will vanish? The chances of such a mishap are only slightly above zero.

The norm is that planes, more than any other form of transport, do not have accidents leading to fatalities.

The “norm” is made up by the person who is slap bang in the middle of the distribution curve. He is the mathematician’s Wanjiku, shorthand for the average.

Though nobody is exactly average. We all have quirks that tend to sit uneasily with the data sets. The norm is, however, useful in helping us understand what to expect with situations.

But, yes, on average, you will not die in a plane crash. Consider that four billion passengers flew using American planes between 2009 and 2013 with no fatalities occurring. Air travel, even in the Third World, is, as the English say, safe as houses. In fact, it is safer than houses since more houses collapse annually than planes fall out of the sky.

Locally, the national carrier, Kenya Airways, has had only two fatal accidents in 34 years. The company has flown close to 30 million passengers with only 114 fatalities in the past 10 years.

What is more, those 114 were all as a result of one flight and are, therefore, not independent of each other. The deaths are related, so their chance of occurring is even lower.

The chance of you dying in a KQ flight is close to one in about 300,000 passengers. The actual figure is, of course, even lower because the deaths occurred on the same flight. Our roads are far more dangerous than our airspace and motorcycles several times more deadly than planes.

The best way to calculate the risk would be to use the number of flights KQ normally has annually, but I was unable to obtain that figure from their press office.

I can say this with utmost certainty: You will not die in an aircraft unless you use a helicopter, in which case your chances of dying increase.

Statistically, the chances of you dying on a plane are miniscule. We weigh regret more heavily, particularly where we are involved because we value ourselves so much.

Our potential death is so horrifying and would affect us so greatly that it makes us believe that any risk, whether real or imagined, is too high to be contemplated. So we end up overestimating our chances of dying, particularly in a dramatic fashion. 

You are more likely to die at the airport than on the aeroplane buddy, so quit worrying.