80% of Airplane Crashes Occur During Take-Off or Landing
One of the running themes of this list is “Safety’s no joke” and we hope you’re taking it to heart. Airplanes are safe, as we’ve said over and over again; certainly much safer than cars. However, accidents can and do happen, and when you look at it how they do so, it’s interesting.
Interesting from a very morbid angle. Let’s get that out of the way.
There are a few organizations which study aviation accidents—chief among them the US’s FAA and the Aviation Crashes Records Office based in Geneva, Switzerland. As the pour over the data, those number-crunches have noticed an interesting pattern. Of the 2,974 crashes since 1999, around 80 percent of them took place within three minutes of either takeoff or landing. That’s . . . awfully specific, don’t you think.
It turns out that those are the most complicated parts of the flight, and thus the times when things are most likely to go wrong. Land gear can fail, engines die at bad moments, and even the most highly trained pilot can make a mistake or two. So ironically cruising along at altitude is the safe part; the closer to the ground you get the more hairy things can become.
We’re not trying to make you paranoid. Honest.