The AOPA Air Safety Institute recently released Collision Avoidance: See, Sense, and Separate, the latest in our series of short videos addressing common hazards of flight. The decision to take up this specific topic so early in the sequence says a lot about the way people think about risk. Although pilots expend a great deal of energy worrying about them, midair collisions actually are among the rarest types of aviation accidents. We typically see about 10 per year, less than 1 percent of the national accident total—and in almost half, everyone involved survives. That’s far more favorable than the 85-percent lethality of unsuccessful attempts to fly VFR in IMC.
So midairs are neither the most common nor the most dangerous—or, for that matter, the most common type of dangerous accident. So why do so many of us obsess over them? Part of the answer is probably that their apparent randomness threatens our sense of control. You’re flying along, minding your own business and doing everything right, until—wham! The same sense of helplessness is at play in the sometimes exaggerated fears provoked by terrorist attacks and other atrocities. The tragedy of these is in no way diminished by pointing out that the number of Americans who died in all terror attacks in the past 20 years, at home or abroad, is less than one-eighth the number killed on our highways in 2013—a level of carnage we somehow accept as normal.
Epidemiologists speak of relative risks, the factor by which a hazard multiplies or a treatment reduces the probability of some adverse event. What sometimes gets lost in news reports is the distinction between relative and absolute. A very high relative risk is still negligible in practical terms if the baseline level is low enough. A first-line treatment for one form of cancer that quadruples the risk of eventually developing another is more than worth using if that jump is from one chance in 10 million to one in 2.5 million. You should be far more worried about the drive home than about being killed by either another aircraft or a mass murderer.
ASI’s collision-avoidance tips serve its market in two ways: showing how small the threat really is, while providing tools to bring it under greater control—to help align anxiety with reality.
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