Flying an Airplane Must Be Easy

I am not afraid of flying.  However, when I am on a plane there is the nagging feeling that being 30,000 feet above the ground is not necessarily a good thing.  If anything should go wrong with the engine or wings or whatever, then my trip to the ground will likely take the rest of my life.  Not only are there those mechanical issues, but the pilot has to be perfect on the landing and take off so that the passengers do not experience the joy of burning jet fuel.  Luckily my concern with the human aspect of flying all but vanished on my return from a conference in Las Vegas because I suddenly realized that flying a plane must be one of the easiest possible things to do.

There are over 28,000 commercial flights per day in the united states.  I assume that since I do not hear massive reports of planes dropping all across the country, that there is less than 1 plane crash per day.  However, if a plane crashed every day, the odds of having a safe flight would still be 27,999:1.  Those are still good odds.  You could fly every day and average one crash every 76 years of your life. 

While on my descent into Richmond International Airport, I began to wonder: how hard is landing a plane if 28,000 planes are landed every day without major issue.  Pilots that have gone through years of training will, on an average day, land 28,000 out of 28,000 attempts.  What possible actions do you think that you could do 28,000 times out of 28,000 attempts?  In the several hundered words that I have typed in this blog post, I have made and corrected several typos (and undoubtedly failed to notice others).  My typing accuracy is at its highest 98%.  It would seem that pilots land airplanes with a higher degree of success than I type the words that I am thinking. 

That, however, is not a very fair assessment.  Pilots train to fly and land planes.  I do not train to type.  The comparison that I thought of was of basketball players.  Suppose I took a professional basketball player and had him do a layup once a minute for eight hours a day (and assume that he never got fatigued).  That player would have to go over 58 days in a row without missing in order to make 28,000 consecutive layups.  I doubt that the best basketball players in the world would not be capable of getting close to that.

So which is harder: making a layup or landing a plane?  I think that if my life depended on doing one of the two, I would at least seriously consider landing a plane.

- Jon