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Who's Complaining?

Entry 795, on 2008-06-16 at 21:34:37 (Rating 1, Travel)

Since I got back from San Francisco people have asked me about the journey and whether I enjoyed it. I reply that the destination was great: San Francisco is a nice city and the conference was brilliant, but the actual travel was really tedious. But then I think about it a bit more and wonder should I really be complaining?

I travelled across the Pacific from New Zealand to California in 12 hours. How long did it take the early explorers to make this journey? Several months, no doubt, and in a lot less comfortable conditions, even though I was in economy class and didn't have a huge amount of space I had fairly good meals and wine, got to watch movies and listen to music, and could even use my laptop. So who's complaining?

And even though people seem to have a lot of concern about air travel safety that is really unfair. When an air accident happens it can be quite spectacular and tends to get a lot of attention, but the chances of being involved in one are tiny. Its probably a lot more dangerous crossing the road.

According to a web site dedicated to air accidents, Delta Airlines is the safest with 2 fatal events from almost 17 million flights over the last 20 years. They quote this statistic: the probability of a passenger being killed on a single flight is approximately eight million-to-one. If a passenger boarded a flight at random, once a day, everyday, it would statistically be over 21,000 years before he or she would be killed. You've got to have a lot of confidence after reading that!

So on balance and despite the tedium of queueing to get through ticketing, customs, security, etc, no one should really complain about the process of flying. If they don't like it they should try going back to the days of Captain Cook and seeing how much they enjoy a journey across the Pacific stuck in a sailing ship!

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