that is great, finally someone else who has come to the party with some statistics......I will overlook the personal attacks, as I am quite curious to get an estimate of the probabilities involved from an expert...I made a layman's guess...I also hope you are not that other troll that has been prowling around under different doppelgangers

can you break down your numbers according to the folliwing

-number of flights by country per year X average passenger numbers

-total number of fligths in US, Europe and Asia

-total global number

-source of data with verifiable source

-all assumptions made

-probability of an incident based on actual historical data.....number of flights, number of injured, breakdown of those caused by pilot equipmennt failure versus spontaneous occurence....

Keep up the good work,

I think you are on to something....

Ever thought of getting out a bit more? Maybe take a plane ride somewhere?

can you please define what an "air pocket " is?

a local region of low pressure or descending air that causes a plane to lose height suddenly

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/air+pocket

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_draft

But seriously, look at the number you have come up with!!! Do you seriously think that there are 1,850,000.000 flights per year!! Are you kidding me? One billion eight hundred and fifty million!!!

I don't want to get tangled up in your conversation here, but I suspect that the high number refers to the total number of passenger trips (one flight carries X number of pax)...?

It is possible to play with numbers and statistics any way one want to, but one of the most common misperceptions regarding air safety is that it is safer to take the plane than it is to drive your car - it is not. This statistic usually points to the km travelled/casualty-ratio, not the number of trips/casualty-ratio. When comparing the number of trips/casualty rate the plane alternative is WAY more risky than driving a car.

As someone being involved in research on vehicular traffic, I'd be interested in some references for this claim that that air travel is more risky than road travel.

My friends were in this flight, they told me the seat bealts sign were on.

They felt very lucky they had their seat bealts on and they had good pilots.

The people who weren't using their seat bealts had some minor injuries so I guess that's why the pilots continued the flight.

I read in one of the earlier posts that there were broken bones. Was this not true?

I can imagine that no bones were broken and only minor injuries happened, as I don't understand why the plane continued for many hours if there were major injuries.