A little side-project: I've just released a 'fear of flying' app to the iPhone appstore: http://appstore.com/amigoingdown Yes, the timing is terrible - that wasn't deliberate. The app allows you to rank airlines and aircraft by historical safety records, and to calculate the overall risk of any given flight. I've removed AirAsia from the list of airlines, for now. Anybody fancy downloading it?
The problem here is that the safety records are so high (accident rate so low) it is sort of like judging your bank on the number of mistakes it makes on people's checking accounts. At some level the risk is too small to make decisions that actually mean anything. The likelihood of the app having a false positive is going to be substantial due to the extremely low prevalence of an actual event.
To some degree you're correct, though I also believe that there's a fair amount of correlation in the stats. That is: it's not purely a spin of the roulette wheel, but there are underlying factors (be it engineering quality, pilot training, whatever) that cause a certain consistency in safety records. Nijo
