Some people let their phobias take over their entire lives, and we can’t help but pity one guy’s stiflingly overcautious lifestyle: This man irrationally refuses to fly despite there being almost zero chance he would ever wind up in a sixth plane crash.
Sorry bud, but your fear just isn’t backed up by statistics!
Commercial aviation is about as safe as modern transit gets, with fliers facing a vastly higher risk of death on the car ride to the airport than they do once onboard the plane, but facts don’t matter to a logic-averse worrywart like Aaron Semple. Instead, he’s sworn off air travel entirely over a completely irrational preoccupation with the possibility of falling victim to a sixth plane crash. That groundless fear has kept him from attending close friends’ weddings and made him miss incredible family vacations to Hawaii, but no matter how clearly you lay out the data for him, Semple just can’t accept that crashes like the five he’s been in pretty much never happen.
Semple’s overactive imagination no doubt stems from the breathless media coverage that follows airplane crashes in the rare instances that they do end up happening to him. Dramatic images of fiery disasters like the crash of Continental Airlines Flight 1404 that Semple survived in 2008 loom large in the public consciousness when they’re rebroadcast ad nauseam by sensationalist cable news channels, but the odds are essentially zero that an average person will ever experience a crash like that in their lifetime, let alone six of them. Still, statistical literacy is hard to come by these days, so when Semple sees that footage of himself covered in blood and being stretchered away from a burning chunk of fuselage, he doesn’t think about the tens of thousands of flights that occur every day without incident. He just thinks, “What if something that terrible happens to me again?”
Some people just won’t listen to reason!
Accidents like the five that have befallen Semple are so rare, in fact, that it’s actually far more likely that he’ll be struck by lightning than it is that he’ll once more hear that now-familiar whine of an aircraft he’s on plummeting from the sky. And even if we charitably assume that the concussion Semple sustained in the deadly crash of Spanair Flight 5022 impaired his brain’s capacity to assess probabilities, it’s still ridiculous to write off such a fast, convenient, and above all safe form of travel over the infinitesimal chance that the worst could repeat itself yet another time.
It’s sad how much this guy lets aviophobia rule his life. Here’s hoping Semple realizes that you can’t live in fear that something horrible but rare might continue to happen to you!
