The holidays are a time of traveling home to your loved ones, which results in an increase of traffic at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, Chicago’s Midway Airport, and other airports nationwide. And as we look forward to being reunited with our loved ones, the last thing on our mind is aviation safety.
Yet in a recent report appearing in the December issue of Aviation, Space and Environmental Medicine (ASEM), stated that more than 1,000 people a year are hospitalized for aviation-related injuries. Fortunately, this report includes all branches of aviation and only about one-tenth of those injuries involved passengers on commercial airlines. However, that still means that more than 100 of those people were injured while flying commercially.
A more in-depth look at the report reveals that the data was compiled from 2000 through 2005 and includes reports from airplane crashes, parachuting accidents, maintenance worker injuries, and passenger injuries that were sustained on the ground. The information came from databases maintained by the federal government’s Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project as neither the National Transportation Safety Board nor the Federal Aviation Administration collects complete information on all injured aircraft passengers.