Visualizing The True Odds of Airborne Terror

In the wake of the Christmas airplane terror attacks, Gizmodo’s Jesus Diaz and Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com fame collaborated on a great infographic poster that compiles much of the data about airplane terror attacks.

After the crotchbomb there has been a lot of noise about airplane security again—you can see how stupid the leaked new flight rules are here. But what’s the actual risk of an airplane attack?

Some numbers to wet your appetite:

• Analyzing data from Oct 1999 to Sep 2009
• Over 99 Million Flights, traveling over 69 Billion miles.
• That’s one attack per 11.5 Billion miles
• or one attack per 3,105 years of air time

via The True Odds of Airborne Terror Chart – Odds of Airborne Attacks – Gizmodo.

This story written by Randall Hand

Randall Hand is a visualization scientist working for a federal research lab, aiding researchers to discover the insights buried within their terabyte datasets generated on some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. He also runs VizWorld.com .