THE Jet Age is eight years old, and its high white contrails and graceful, swept-wing planes are familiar sights from the most cosmopolitan cities to the farthest provinces of the globe. Flight has grown into an absolute essential for mobile, modern man. By occasional tourist and veteran traveler, the big aircraft are recognized as the most comfortable, convenient means of long-distance travel. Yet hardly a passenger escapes entirely from an ancient skepticism, a lurking suspicion that manned flight is somehow unnatural and inherently dangerous. The hazards are always magnified. Just as the Sunday driver tends to minimize the difficulties of the crowded highway because he himself is at the wheel, in control of his own destiny, the air traveler often exaggerates his peril. He has put the responsibility for his life into the hands of others—pilot, ground controllers, even weathermen—and his unease is understandable. When word of a crash hits the headlines, he inevitably asks himself the question he has asked so many times before: "Is flying really safe?"
It is. Scheduled-airline flying in the U.S. is 6.4 times safer than personal driving; a person would have to travel 263 million miles in a plane, but only 41 million miles in a car, before he ran an odds-on chance of being killed. More people die by falling off ladders than by crashing in airliners. Life insurance is no more expensive for today's pilots than it is for bookkeepers; in a year, only one commercial pilot out of 1,000 dies in a plane. And the record is steadily improving; one accident occurred in every 85,000 hours of flight in 1959, but the rate in 1965 was one in every 800,000 hours.
Reason for this reassuring ratio is that no other industry spends nearly so much time or money playing it safe. The planes themselves are built to such exacting standards that any big multiengined plane can easily climb away from the ground with one engine out, cruise on even less power, and land safely—as a Pan Am 707 did last year—with half a wing burned away. If private cars were serviced as intensely as commercial planes, each driver would need three full-time mechanics, and his auto would be fully inspected before every trip, however short. As for pilots, the airlines select only one applicant out of 20, spend $1,000 an hour to train him, retest him every six months, send him back to flight school once a year, and pay him up to $40,000 a year. With rare exceptions, the pilots are well worth it. Says Jerome Lederer, director of the Flight Safety Foundation and one of the nation's top air-safety experts: "Unless he is a professional driver, no man is one-tenth as capable of driving as the greenest copilot is capable of flying."