How safe are airplane landings?

A plane cruises for more than half of the one-and-a-half-hour trip, but only 11% of fatal accidents happen during this chunk. So that leaves the final descent and landing. They take up about 4% of the average flight, lasting twice as long as takeoff and initial climb.



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During the landing phase, there are 36% of the accidents (14% during the final approach and 22% during landing), accounting for 24% of the fatalities. This means that there is a greater chance of being in an accident during the landing phase but the likelihood of being a fatality is approximately the same.

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Go-arounds or aborted landings are fairly rare and occur around 1 to 3 times in every 1,000 approaches.

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Hard landings can vary in their consequences, from mild passenger discomfort to vehicle damage, structural failure, injuries, and/or loss of life. Hard landings can cause extensive damage to aircraft.

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8 Steps to Overcoming Your Fear of Flying
  1. Latch on to triggers that set you off. ...
  2. Step onto the airplane with knowledge. ...
  3. Anticipate your anxiety. ...
  4. Separate fear from danger. ...
  5. Recognize that common sense makes no sense. ...
  6. Smooth over things that go bump in the flight. ...
  7. Educate fellow fliers how to help you. ...
  8. Value each flight.


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Severe turbulence can cause a plane to drop so suddenly that pilots temporarily lose control. But, again, that's not enough to crash the plane. That's not to say it's never happened. In 1966, human error and turbulence combined to bring a plane down over Mount Fuji.

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The normal sink rate of an aircraft on landing is two to three feet per second; when a pilot lands at seven to eight feet per second, it will feel harder than normal. Pilots have been known to report it as a hard landing, Brady explained, even though the landing was within the prescribed limits.

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Among other things, this means descending to a lower altitude and, potentially, reducing the airplane's speed. If all of an airplane's engines fail simultaneously, the pilot will perform an emergency landing.

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Discussion: In some cases pilots may need to reject a landing due to rapidly deteriorating weather conditions which reduce the visibility required for a safe landing.

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If the aircraft is arriving and the approach and runway are busy the flight may be direct into a pattern to wait it's turn to approach and land. Circling is a traffic management system that is infrequently used today. Most often it is employed to manage air traffic during difficult weather conditions.

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Takeoff and landing are widely considered the most dangerous parts of a flight.

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READ MORE ON TRAVEL A middle seat at the back of a plane was found to be the safest, with a 28 per cent mortality rate - compared to the worst, an aisle seat in the middle of the cabin, which has a mortality rate of 44 per cent.

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1. Can a passenger plane fly with just one wing or upside down? “An airplane cannot stay in the air with just one wing. Both wings are necessary to provide enough lifting power for the plane to stay in the air.

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The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) was quoted as stating turbine engines have a failure rate of one per 375,000 flight hours, compared to of one every 3,200 flight hours for aircraft piston engines.

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Transferring too much weight onto the nosewheel causes a situation called wheelbarrowing, which can lead to a loss of directional control, prop strike, or nose gear collapse. On top of those problems, with little to no weight on your main landing gear, you have little braking action.

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Landing is, without a doubt, one of the hardest things to do in aviation. Landing at night is even harder. With significantly fewer visual cues, you need to rely on your instruments and airport lighting much more during night landings. There are lots of different reasons your night landing can go bad.

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The typical airplane tire can go through about 500 landings before it needs to be repaired. Usually, the top layer of tread is simply peeled off and replaced with new tread. That way, the other parts don't need to be replaced.

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Turbulence is a sudden and sometimes violent shift in airflow. Those irregular motions in the atmosphere create air currents that can cause passengers on an airplane to experience annoying bumps during a flight, or it can be severe enough to throw an airplane out of control. (The pilots) aren't scared at all.

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When an aircraft experiences turbulence, the plane can drop or change altitude suddenly. This is why pilots always caution passengers to buckle up and stay seated when they are experiencing flight turbulence. The sudden movements put passengers at risk.

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While turbulence can feel scary, airplanes are designed to withstand massive amounts of it. A plane cannot be flipped upside-down, thrown into a tailspin, or otherwise flung from the sky by even the mightiest gust or air pocket, wrote pilot Patrick Smith on his site, AskThePilot.com.

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