If you're avoiding air travel after MH17 and more, let statistics be your guide

Is it really so irrational to avoid air travel in the wake of the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine, and the TransAsia crash off the coast of Taiwan, and now the Algerian airliner in Northern Africa?

Yes. Completely, totally and entirely irrational. You are probably not going to die in an airplane crash, The Guardian says.

It's a widespread fear after planes go down, even though the truth is that air travel is almost always boringly safe and uneventful (whether we concentrate on major US airlines or other carriers around the world). The latest global airline safety report shows there were 90 commercial airplane accidents in 2013. Only nine involved fatalities – a total of 173 people.

These deaths might initially seem to you like large figures – or make the nearly 350 fatalities in the last week between MH17 and the TransAsia tragedy (and hopefully not more) sound enormous – but you are missing crucial context: there were around 32m airline departures in 2013, according to the figures from the International Civil Aviation Organization. That means that fewer than one flight in 300,000 had an accident, and only one in 3,000,000 was fatal.

For one, the fear of dying in a plane crash might actually kill you. For instance, in the wake of the 9/11 air tragedy, huge numbers of Americans switched from flying to driving – for the year following the attack, airline passenger miles fell between 12% and 20% while road use surged. Eventually Americans returned to the skies – but not all of them, tragically, were alive to do so, because driving long distances is much more dangerous than flying – indeed, because the increased road use may have led to more accidents.

As far as transportation is concerned, by far the riskiest way to go anywhere is to take a motorcycle. Mile-for-mile (which is not an entirely fair comparison, as we generally fly further than we bike), motorcycling is more than 3,000 times more deadly than flying. Travelling in a car or truck is about 100 times more deadly than flying. Travelling by train can end up a little less grisly – it's only twice as deadly, mile-for-mile, as flying. Overall, fewer than 2% of US deaths are transportation-related.

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