Since 1978, over 2.5 BILLION passengers have traveled on the airlines world wide. This represents about 15 million individual flights. In that 30 year span of time there have only been a few dozen airline crashes where fatalities occurred, and only a few thousand people have been killed or seriously injured. Therefore, your chances of being a passenger on a fatal flight is perhaps one in a million. Statistically, you have a greater chance of being killed on the ground by a bolt of lightning. To put it in perspective, roughly 30,000 people have been killed in car accidents in the USA in 2008. That's the equivalent of two Boeing 747's loaded with passengers crashing and killing everyone on board, each and every week of the year.
Tragic indeed. IMO, given the conditions at the time, I'm not so sure that craft should've been allowed to fly.
