Your comments on Johnny May's post are very interesting and reminded me of other things to say.
Quite a few of the comments related to fear of flying. I can understand that. However, and I think you've been told this before, safety is taken to a very high level. Airplanes are very carefully built. Much engineering goes into the design. A routine set of inspections are done before every flight. The amount of time an aircraft has flown is strictly monitored and at certain hours much of the aircraft is taken apart and rebuilt. Each year servicing and inspection must take place. It's not like Orville and Wilbur Wright where they flew by the seat of their pants.
Next , pilots are highly trained. It takes 20 hours of flying as well as ground instruction to get a private pilot license. Training goes on from there. A pilot must be checked out on each new aircraft he/she flies. So there is a tremendous amount of skill and knowledge needed to fly. Safety rules are very strict.
Now I'm sure you've all had that boring info before.
So if we compare planes to automobiles we would have far fewer accidents if drivers had to have 20 hours driving time to get a license. If cars were built and inspected like airplanes there would be far fewer accidents.
I have had a few nervous moments when flying. A flight from Phoenix to Minneapolis was the worst. We ran into a winter storm just after leaving Arizona. The storm got much worse. The pilot told us we couldn't land in Minneapolis and that we would "shoot " over to Chicago to land. Then they changed and found that they could land in Minneapolis. The whole flight was rough. We saw the ground just before the wheels touched down. Everybody clapped when we hit the ground. For me , this was a nail biter.
Then our connecting flight could not be made as the airplane used for the connector couldn't get into Minneapolis. We spent a lot of time staring out the windows watching snow swirl around.
