On any given day, more than 87,000 flights are in the skies in the United States. Only one third are commercial carriers; the rest are general aviation flights (27,178), air taxi flights (24,548), military flights (5,260) or cargo flights (2,148).
Airline travel has been increasing every year. In 2000, Boeing reported that there were 18 million flights in the air, while today, air traffic controllers average more than three times that number. "It would take approximately 7,300 airport terminal monitors to show all the flights controllers handle in a single day and approximately 460 monitors to show the number of flights being handled at any one time," according to the National Air Traffic Controllers Association.
Statistics on average annual airline travel are important to people who want to put their fear of flying to rest. Using these statistics, and combining them with statistics on accidents, we can hypothesize that the probability of dying in a domestic plane crash are one in 70 million, according to MIT statistician Arnold Barnett, who has performed analyses for the Federal Aviation Administration. To put that in perspective, the probability of dying in a car crash is 1 in 6,000 if you drive your car more than 10,000 miles per year.
