True Odds of Airborne Terror
Update: I decided to put a link to the graphic instead in the name of fairness (it’s not cool for me to post the image in full). You can find it here: The True Odds of Airborne Terror Chart – Odds of Airborne Attacks – Gizmodo.
In the meantime, some numbers to wet your appetite:
- Analyzing data from Oct 1999 to Sep 2009
- Over 99 Million Flights, traveling over 69 Billion miles.
- That’s one attack per 11.5 Billion miles
- or one attack per 3,105 years of air time
This entry was posted on Monday, January 4th, 2010 at 3:37 pm and is filed under Images, Mathematics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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on January 5th, 2010 at 11:28 am
For sure, the math makes it less scary. However, there is the human/social (media) aspect involved as a hidden factor, which can make the raw mathmatics, and statistical nature of this issue almost a non point. It dosen’t matter what math says as the plane is inserting itself into the ground, subjectively speaking.
on January 5th, 2010 at 1:14 pm
The human/social aspect isn’t a hidden factor. It is the overriding factor, otherwise terrorism wouldn’t work. It creates a fulcrum using our natural tendency to miscalculate risks vs. rewards by highlighting the risks right where it intersects with the rewards. That’s how it leverages itself into the collective psyche, by playing off of our ignorance of the true risks involved.
Education is really the only way to inoculate against this tactic. Yes, it is a mountain that needs to be scaled where there really should be no more than an anthill, but as with all learning the first step is perspective. The problem seems gargantuan because our sense of risk vs. reward is not centered, but is skewed by the actions of a few. Graphics such as these are an attempt to pull back from our intuitive assessments and gain an unbiased perspective on what the actual risks and rewards are. It won’t fundamentally change the human reaction, but it may mitigate the damage done by those who are deliberately playing off of our ignorance by educating people on what is true rather than what is perceived.