ONLY ABOUT 100 PASSENGERS A YEAR INJURED ON COMMERCIAL AIRCRAFT

NY Times - More than 1,000 people a year are hospitalized for aviation-related injuries, with only one-tenth of them passengers in commercial aircraft.

Researchers have analyzed data from 2000 through 2005, gathering information on crashes, parachuting accidents, airport maintenance worker injuries and passenger injuries sustained on the ground, among others. The report, which appears in the December issue of Aviation, Space, and Environmental Medicine, uses a group of health care databases maintained by the federal government’s Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project.

Only 10.6 percent of those hospitalized were traveling in commercial aircraft. More than 32 percent were injured in private planes, and almost 11 percent in gliders or hang gliders. Unsurprisingly, jumping out of an airplane is quite dangerous: 28.9 percent of those injured were parachutists.

More than 28 percent of all injuries were to the lower limbs. And while burns were seen in just 2.5 percent of the patients, they accounted for 17 percent of deaths after hospitalization.