Yesterday’s Yemenia Airlines crash was the second one this month involving a large number of passenger fatalities. Although there is at least one survivor and hopefully more, these events renew anxieties about flying and overshadow just how safe flying commercially has become.
The Internet is a great tool for researching airline safety, but it is easy to get swamped by facts and figures. Airline Safety Records.com and its companion site, AirSafe.com, are for those who want to get mired in the details.
For me, the most helpful table I could find was on Wikipedia and came from, of all places, Alycidon Rail, the “website of Roger Ford, Industry & Technology Editor of Modern Railways and Founding Editor of Rail Business Intelligence.” While the facts are from a decade-old study from the UK Department for the Environment, Transport and Regions (DETR), it analyzes deaths from different forms of transportation in three ways – deaths per billion journeys, deaths per billion hours and deaths per billion kilometers (note: I assume that this study is using the British ‘billion’ which is a million million or 1,000,000,000,000, not 1,000,000,000, so these numbers are a thousand times better than you might first have thought!).
While air travel doesn’t look relatively good on a deaths per journey basis (it is only safer than riding on a motorcycle or a bicycle by this measure), on a deaths per distance-traveled basis, it is by far the safest form of transportation.
With the benefit of a few weeks of perspective on the H1N1 outbreak, it’s possible to conclude that the some of the initial response qualifies as overreaction. Let’s start with the World Health Organization’s declaration of a pandemic. Observers such as 
As we promised in 
Congratulations to Angelo Masciantonio, CEO and Co-Founder of HTH Worldwide, for receiving the Greater Philadelphia 
Scores of Americans are traveling the globe for leisure, business, study and missionary travel. Because of the recent travel concerns raised by the H1N1 pandemic and terrorist threats like the Mumbai attacks, many of these smart travelers are better planning and preparing to avoid potential hazards. 
Experienced travelers know that taking to the local roadways can be one of the most dangerous passages on an international itinerary. Whether in a taxi or a bus, or as a cyclist or a pedestrian, travelers roll the dice with their health and safety. Now the World Health Organization (WHO) has released a 
Packing for a trip used to be easy. I would wake up the morning of the trip, grab a suitcase, throw in more clothes than I needed, dump all of the things on my bathroom sink into my Dopp kit*, sign a stack of traveler’s checks and, of course, write all of their serial numbers in that small, separate booklet just in case and last, but not least, make sure I had my itinerary or at least a semblance of one.
Japan is taking the threat of H1N1 very seriously, as evidenced by the new process arriving international flights must undergo. I experienced this first hand when I went to Japan a few weeks ago to attend my niece’s wedding. 
