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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: epicure who wrote (128202)	1/7/2010 2:57:56 PM
From: Rambi	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 542140

even with all the human error there are very very very few terrorist events Very few! I have seen a couple of posts from people saying adamantly they will never fly again, although I guess they still get in their car or take a shower or ride a bike. I remember some of that after 9-11, too. The first time I flew in '01- about a week after flights resumed-the plane was absolutely empty. There were a few people in coach, and I was alone in first. I spent the whole time in the galley with the flight attendants, speculating on how long it would take to recover. Hard to imagine now with flights flying at over 80% capacity.(I think I read that) But for all of those who are antsy about flying: So how do these common risks compare to your risk of dying in a terrorist attack? To try to calculate those odds realistically, Michael Rothschild, a former business professor at the University of Wisconsin, worked out a couple of plausible scenarios. For example, he figured that if terrorists were to destroy entirely one of America's 40,000 shopping malls per week, your chances of being there at the wrong time would be about one in one million or more. Rothschild also estimated that if terrorists hijacked and crashed one of America's 18,000 commercial flights per week that your chance of being on the crashed plane would be one in 135,000. Even if terrorists were able to pull off one attack per year on the scale of the 9/11 atrocity, that would mean your one-year risk would be one in 100,000 and your lifetime risk would be about one in 1300. (300,000,000 ÷ 3,000 = 100,000 ÷ 78 years = 1282) In other words, your risk of dying in a plausible terrorist attack is much lower than your risk of dying in a car accident, by walking across the street, by drowning, in a fire, by falling, or by being murdered.