soup dragon

Tadger Buffer....Sounds Familiar

DaveD

iTrader: (2)

Rubbish!! All commercial aircraft are designed to cope with a single engine out - the chances of which are tens of thousands to one against. The chances of a twin-jet loosing both engines are well in the millions to one against.

If an aircaft looses an engine, it is designed to be able to maintain a cruising altitude for up to 3 hours. Even multiple bird-stikes on take off are accounted for.

With the number of aircraft in the air, engine failures are a daily occurance, but very rarely is there any form of incident.


The stall speed of most comercial aircraft is around 150 knots in normal trim. The latest A340 does not stall until around 120 knots!!!

Put simply, with all the redundancy in the engines and control systems, you are very unlikely to come down due to a mechanical/control failure. Pilots are regularly trained to cope with virtually any situation, so by flying, you are using the safest form of transport currently known to man.

MarkO

Somebody who doesn't understand statistics. You're just as likely to crash in the first day than on the last day of the 26,000th year.

Soup, my wife can't fly - not for fear reasons, but for medical reasons. It can be restricting, but when it comes down to it, it's not really a problem. We had our honeymoon in Scotland (and then moved here 'cos we like it so much) and have holidayed in the Channel Islands, etc.

She doesn't like boats, either, but with the tunnel we could still see most of Europe, Asia, Africa, etc., without having to fly - we'd just need longer to get there. And since you can get to Oz by ship in a little under 3 weeks, and the US in a week, the only real issue is that if we wanted to travel to such places, we'd need to take a couple of months' extra holiday to do it - hardly a disaster!

The most important thing to do is if you really can't fly, let your wife and children go without you. My wife's said that if I ever want to go somewhere that she can't get to without flying, that she's happy for me to go with a mate, etc., which is very generous. As it happens, I'm not overly worried at the moment, and would rather go somewhere over-ground with her....

Leslie

Like all aircrew I was never too happy about flying as a passenger. I found the best defence is to sleep for the whole flight. The worry soon passes after you have done that a few times.

If the engines fail, the aircraft will glide quite happily all that way from high altitude to ground level as long as the flying controls are working. But it would be most unusual to lose so many of the engines that it will not continue to fly even if it had to be at a lower altitude.

Les

[Edited by Leslie - 7/8/2003 1:10:03 PM]

Tadger Buffer

soup dragon, you might want to try hypnosis or even self-hypnosis. Fear of flying is one of the things that can be cured that way. It's not all weird blokes saying ... look into my eyes ... you will feel sleepy ... and it's not the same as stage hypnosis, though Paul McKenna seems to do both.

[Edited by Tadger Buffer - 7/8/2003 10:07:18 PM]