Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
A new iPhone app could help calm your fears about flying (or make them worse, depending upon the situation) by telling you the odds that the plane you’re currently on will crash.
The app, which was created by London-based software development firm Vanilla Pixel, is called Am I Going Down?. For the reasonable fee of 99 cents, frequent flyers can download it, input the details of their flight, and find out how likely it is that they’ll reach their destination safely.
Am I Going Down? asks users for the names of the airports they will be departing from and arriving at, as well as the airline they are using and the type of plane they currently are on. The app then uses actual flight statistics from 10 million possible routes to assess the overall risk.
For example, a CNN.com article published Friday said that a person flying a Boeing 777 Cathay Pacific flight from Hong Kong to Los Angeles has just a one in 4,068,434 chance of being in a plane crash, according to the app. In other words, the odds are that someone could take that same flight every day for the next 11,146 years without crashing once.
“The initial inspiration comes from my co-founder and wife, Julie, who for many years has suffered from a fear of flying,” developer Nic Johns told the website. “In developing ‘Am I Going Down?’ I wanted to present the fact that the vast majority of flights are incredibly low risk. Our app is meant as tool to help reassure fearful flyers.”
Johns’ wife is not alone. According to statistics provided by the company, as many as one-fifth of all people in the UK experience anxiety about flying at some point in their lives, and a study by Boeing researchers in the US found that 18 percent of American adults had similar fears.
How do they come up with the numbers?
The software developer said that the source for the information provided by the app is data collected from the US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and the Bureau of Aircraft Accidents Archives in Geneva (crash statistics), as well as the Montreal-based International Civil Aviation Organization (airport data).
“For my analysis I only include crashes where there was at least one passenger fatality – which is the relevant stat for those with a fear of flying,” Johns told CNN. “I then incorporate the volume of flights, weighted to the most recent 10 years, to provide the final ‘one in a million’ statistics.”
“The simple fact is that flights are incredibly safe, invariably in the millions to one range,” he added in a statement, “but it’s more useful to someone who is a nervous flyer to know the past performance for their type of aircraft and their particular journey, rather than just generic figures… The positive response from anxious flyers has been amazing, really encouraging.”
Am I Going Down? is currently available on Apple’s App store for both the iPhone and the iPad, and Johns said that Vanilla Pixel is considering developing an Android version of the app.
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