ANDREW ALLENTUCK
Special to The Globe and Mail
Thursday, March 9, 2000

You've heard it before: Flying is safer than driving. And, despite a recent spate of air accidents, it's still true.But if you're still nervous and need concrete reassurances, help is at hand.

The Internet is a good source of information, with various organizations or individuals having Web sites that answer a lot of questions and provide statistical data.

One such person with a Web site is Todd Curtis, a former U.S. Air Force flight-test engineer with a PhD in aviation-risk assessment. On the odds of dying in a crash, he says, "If an average person in the U.S. were to board one flight a day, it would be 20,000 years before he died in a fatal accident [according to safety statistics]."

Mr. Curtis, who maintains a public database on air safety and advice for travellers at airsafe.com, notes that major airlines flying wide-bodied jets on scheduled routes in the developed world, mainly in North America and Europe, are the safest; flying in the developing world on an old Russian turboprop such as an Ilyushin 14 or Antonov 24 on an unscheduled route is the least safe.

According to his calculations for 1970 to 1997, Cuba's airline, Cubana, had an estimated fatality rate of 24 per million flights, a casualty rate far higher than that of British Airways PLC of Britain, with a rate of 0.32, or of Icelandair of Iceland, SAS of Scandinavia, Aer Lingus of Ireland, Canadian Airlines International Ltd. of Calgary, Southwest Airlines Co. of Dallas, El Al Israel Airlines Ltd. of Israel, Qantas Airways Ltd. of Australia and various other carriers, which all had a rate of 0 in that period.

His Web site does have some limitations, he says. Data about Third World airlines remain somewhat sketchy, and the many airlines that emerged from the breakup of the Soviet carrier Aeroflot are hard to track and so aren't included.

The Canadian Transportation Safety Board (http://www.tsb.gc.ca)does publish data on specific aircraft accidents and Transport Canada is developing a disclosure procedure for names of firms not in compliance with safety standards, says Art LaFlamme, director-general of civil aviation for Transport Canada.

"Canadian data for disclosure is not yet as comprehensive as U.S. data presently available on the Net," he says. "We are looking at ways of putting that data on the Transport Canada Web site."

If you're interested in finding out more about the aircraft you may be travelling on, you can visit http://av-info.faa.gov/GetFleetAge.asp, which gives the average age of various makes of aircraft. According to that section of the U.S. Federal Aviation Authority's Web site (http://www.faa.gov), the oldest are DC-3s, with an average age of 60 years, that are still flying in a few mainly remote regions.

The newest fleets include the Canadair CL65-600, de Havilland DHC8-200, Boeing 777 and Airbus 319-1, all three years old.

So, how many people visit these sites, and who are they? Mr. Curtis says a thousand people a day look at his site. "Some are average people; some are insiders who are in the aviation industry, and we do have a small number of nut cases. Ten per cent are media inquiries."

What about checking out Third World airlines, considering that the odds against crashing on even marginal carriers are very good?

Paul Turk, a spokesman for the FAA in Washington, says: "The odds of your being involved in an accident, let alone a fatal accident, are insignificantly small, but it never hurts to check on your airline or aircraft."

Related Web sites

Here a few more sites that offer data on aircraft and airline safety:
www.ntsb.gov -- The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board site includes information on its publications, news and events, legal matters and links to related sites.
www.iapa.com -- The International Airline Passengers Association site offers information on membership, and includes a section on aviation issues among its travel services.
http://www.aviation-safety.net -- The Aviation Safety Network site includes statistics, accident reports, news, pictures and a forum.
http://www.tsb.gc.ca -- The Transportation Safety Board of Canada site covers marine, pipeline, rail and air. It includes information on the board's mandate, investigative procedures, key safety issues, government acts and useful links.

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