Hope for the best but assume the worst. It's been a scary year in aviation.

I'm hoping future generations look at me crazy when I tell them aircraft and cars used to crash. Increased transportation safety and reliability is something I really want.

In 2012 there were 6 air crashes out of 37.5 million flights[1]. That's a safety level of 99.999984%. I think we all want 100% safety, but realistically that's about as close to perfect as we're ever going to get

What makes air travel scary is the way it's reported by the media. That's what we ought to be improving.

[1] http://newsfeed.time.com/2013/02/28/2012-was-the-safest-year...

Is your source correct ? Wikiedia lists 13 crashes in 2012: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incident...

    > but realistically that's about as close to perfect as
    > we're ever going to get

Doubt it. My understanding is the majority of crashes are caused by human error; once we eliminate the human decision making, we should expect that to go down.

> It's been a scary year in aviation.

Maybe it's just perception bias because we hear a lot about crashes around the same timing, but we'll have to look at the data to see if planes indeed crashed way more than in previous years or not.

What I mean is the aviation incidents have been quite shocking and peculiar. Mh370 goes missing without a trace. Mh17 is shot down.

Then, it just so happens that several incidents all were clumped together. Foreign airliners crash at a much higher rate than US, but the manner which the two MH flights have gone down is very shocking for such a short period of time.