Six Dead At Cork Airport: Martin McGuinness Not Among Them

SIX people are dead at Cork Airport. A plane crashed in fog. Six others were injured as the turbo prop aircraft with 10 passengers and two crew was travelling from Belfast City Airport on a Manx2 commuter flight.

The Mail says:

Sin Fein’s Martin McGuinness was due to take doomed flight that crashed in Cork but changed plans at the last minute [sic]

Six dead but the Mail focuses on one who remains alive. 

The plane was a Metroliner. Was it dangerous? Is plane travel dangerous? Well, not really, no:

The global death toll from air crashes rose by 13% to 828 last year as the fatal accident rate worsened from one per 1.5m flights in 2009 to one in every 1.3m flights in 2010. The Ascend consultancy, which produced the figures, described 2010 as a “poor” year for the industry with aircraft insurance claims reaching their highest total of $1.1bn (£685m).”

More dangerous than cars?

In 2007, 646 pedestrians were killed in road accidents in Great Britain; this was 22 per cent of all deaths from road accidents, a 78 per cent decrease from 40 years ago when pedestrian fatalities were 2,964.

He has more:

The air transport industry, for example, will almost always choose a per km basis, which is optimum for them, as most fatalities occur on landing and take-off, while the intervening distances are large. Land based transport organisations, in contrast, will tend to select fatalities per number of journeys or hours of travel, since the risks are uniformly spread. Thus both are able to demonstrate that theirs is the safest form of transport. The actual statistics are given below (taken from an article by Roger Ford in Modern Railways, Oct 2000 and based on a DETR survey). They record the number of fatalities per billion km, journeys or hours of travel.

Anorak

Posted: 10th, February 2011 | In: Reviews Comment (1) | TrackBack | Permalink