Is Flying Safe? Lake Erie Search Could Strike Fear In Regular Flyers

A Cessna carrying six people, including three children, went missing after departing a Cleveland airport Thursday night. While these stories may make you think flying isn’t safe, the fact is flying is still quite safe around the country.

Advancement of plane design, airlines performing better searches for the best pilots and even major financial incentives for airlines are all reasons to feel confident when taking to the sky, a report from Travel + Leisure found. Going further, developers of an app released last year found there’s a one in 4,068,434 chance that your plane could crash, meaning even if you fly once a day every day for 11,146 years, your plane still won’t crash, CNN reported.

But sometimes the worst scenario is real. The small plane with six people aboard and en route to Ohio State University reportedly disappeared late Thursday following take off near Lake Erie, NBC News reported. The plane, a Cessna Citation 525 left Burke Lakefront Airport in Cleveland at 10:57 p.m. but air traffic control “lost contact” with the aircraft almost right after takeoff.

Though the group hasn’t been identified as a family, the occupants of the flight were three adults and three children who were heading back to Ohio State University Airport after attending a Cleveland Cavaliers home game at Quicken Loans Arena, a spokesperson for the airport told NBC News.

The Federal Aviation Administration confirmed the plane’s destination to NBC.

The plane was bound for the university, however, the group aboard reportedly had no affiliation with Ohio State, the U.S. Coast Guard told the AP. The names of the passengers had not yet been released. The plane is normally stored at Ohio State University’s hangar.

The story can be scary for anyone planning to fly in a small aircraft, but advancements in technology and plane design can greatly assuage fears. Over the last 50 years, airlines have collected all the data from their flights and have streamlined it to improve planes. Some of those improvements involve switching cockpit technology from mechanical to electronic consoles. Pilots now have tons of information thanks to the improved tech and use that to better man their aircraft.

“During the 1950s and 1960s, fatal accidents occurred about once every 200,000 flights,” a spokeswoman for Boeing told T+L. “Today, the worldwide safety record is more than 10 times better, with fatal accidents occurring less than once in every two million flights.”