[Central Scrutiniser]

All the american airlines are safe, however, United and American are not exactly the leaders in safety. American had the A300 lose a tail at JFK, they had a MD80 crash in Little Rock, and they ran a 757 directly into a mountainside in Columbia, all in the last 5 years. United had the crash landing of the DC-10 in Souix City, the cargo door pop on a 747-200 on the way to Hawaii, and they ran a 737-300 head on into the ground outside of Colorado Springs. US Airways had 2 crashes at LaGuardia and one at LAX in the last few years.

I'll take Southwest, America West, Frontier, Jet Blue, and ATA, no fatalities.....

[getmeouttaPalmBeachCounty_FL]

Just like TWA 800, I think the jury will never get the real evidence on AA 587. The Cali, Columbia flight occurred in 1995. The Little Rock flight was I believe, due to pilot error/crew rest issues & decisions in bad weather.

As for AA, United and US Air...they have more flights/day by far, than the smaller and newer airlines.

[getmeouttaPalmBeachCounty_FL]

I wanted to post this last night, but I couldn't find it:

DEATH BY: YOUR ODDS
Cardiovascular disease: 1 in 2
Smoking (by/before age 35): 1 in 600
Car trip, coast-to-coast: 1 in 14,000
Bicycle accident: 1 in 88,000
Tornado: 1 in 450,000
Train, coast-to-coast: 1 in 1,000,000
Lightning: 1 in 1.9 million
Bee sting: 1 in 5.5 million
U.S. commercial jet airline: 1 in 7 million Sources: Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of California at Berkeley


Killed by Airline Crashes

While there are risks in using all forms of transportation, commercial airline travel is one of the safest. From January 1982 to March 2001, a period of 19.25 years, there were a total of 8,109,000,000 passenger enplanements. During that same time period, there were 2,301 fatalities (120 people killed on average each year), and 348 serious injuries. This amounts to a 0.00003% chance of being seriously injured or killed in a commercial aviation accident. This is far less than any other mode of transportation. [Source: NTSB, Passenger Fatalities, 1982 through March 2001.] 


The NTSB wishes to make clear to all......(that the list of airline crashes)...... cannot, by itself, be used to compare the safety either of operators or of aircraft types. Airlines that have operated the greatest numbers of flights and flight hours could be expected to have suffered the greatest number of fatal-to-passenger accidents (assuming that such accidents are random events, and not the result of some systematic deficiency). Similarly, the most used aircraft types would tend to be involved in such accidents more than lesser used types. The NTSB also cautions the user to bear in mind when attempting to compare today's airline system to prior years that airline activity (and hence exposure to risk) has risen by almost 100% from the first year depicted to the last.
updated February 2003