The past year has seen an incredible amount of plane crashes.

It all started with the MH370, which quite literally vanished off the face of the earth as far as we can tell. Then MH17 crashed in the Ukraine. Those two Malaysia Airlines planes prompted a new trend it seems – there was TransAsia Airways Flight 222, Air Algérie Flight 5017, Air Asia Flight 8501… those are the ones I remember offhand. There are others.

But let’s look at the numbers.

2014 accounted for 761 deaths via airplane crash, according to this graph from CNN. Vice counts 992 people. Considering billions of people flew last year, the numbers are pretty good.

But still, these plane crashes were not random little prop planes scattering insecticide over fields. They were commercial airliners that you or I could have been on. To put it into perspective, when that Air Asia flight went down in December I was headed to Vietnam. Luckily for me I chose a different airline. South African comedian and actor Siv Ngesi had booked his whole trip on Air Asia, though, and had his fingers crossed as many times as possible. When Malaysia Airlines still flew from South Africa to Argentina, I used them.

With regards to the Airbus A320, there are currently about 5 600 flying around at the moment and since their entrance to the skies in 1988 there have only been 12 fatal accidents. That’s 0.14 accidents per million flights, according to Boeing safety experts.

According to stats, it’s still safer to fly rather than drive, or even cross the road.

The chances of dying in a plane crash are still 1 in 8,321 over the course of one’s entire life (compared to, say, 1 in 723 for death in a pedestrian accident or 1 in 119 for unintentional poisoning). Deaths in cars and motorcycles are 100 and 3,000 times more common per ride, respectively.

Hopefully you don’t die whilst walking to your car after work today.

[Source: Vice and CNN]