Air travel is 22 times safer than driving a car

If the very thought of flying makes you panicky, then here is some respite.

A recent study conducted by US National Safety Council has found that air travel is 22 times safer than travelling by car.

In addition, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have calculated that, statistically, one would have to fly every day for 22,000 years to be involved in a fatal aircraft accident, reports News.com.au.

So, that would by giving you a peace of mind, but who best to go to for a reassurance?

A pilot, of course - someone who is always up in the air day in, day out.

Qantas captain Alex Passerini has been flying for 23 years and says it’s certainly the best form of transport.

‘‘It’s far riskier crossing the street in front of my office building than flying around in the air, I can assure you,’’ he says.

Passerini adds that advances over the years have made flying ‘‘without doubt’’, the safest form of mass transport in the world.

‘‘We have improved training, better simulators that can deliver more effective training and you need to remember a succession of events would really have to occur for anything to go wrong, too,” he spoke in favour of flight safety.

‘‘We have multiple systems on board the aeroplane and a term we use a lot is redundancy. So any single failure can’t adversely affect the safety of the plane and, in fact, we deal with multiple levels, so you’re talking about one, two, three or even four failures that have to occur”, he said.

Regarding the common concern of turbulence, Passerini said: "Turbulence is simply a change in wind speed and direction, so it’s a bit like riding on a road and you encounter potholes’’.

‘‘In a pilot’s life there would only be a handful of cases where we would see severe turbulence and even then the aeroplane is many, many times inside what it’s been built to manage”, he added.