Having just booked a flight to Berlin in June with Germanwings, I thought it might be useful to explain why.

Air travel is extraordinarily safe.  Last year, around 1300 people died in commercial aviation accidents, the highest figure since the collapse of the twin towers. Almost half of these were victims of the two incidents involving Malaysian Airlines.  Tyler Brulé described in Saturday’s paper the fear of flying  that led him to abandon his flight to London.  The chances of a man of Mr Brulé’s age dying in any two hour interval is around one in a million.  There is an additional one in five million chance of being killed during a two hour flight. On the other hand, sitting in an aircraft protects you from many more common causes of death, such as a fatal car crash or falling down stairs.

Despite the continued growth in aviation traffic, aviation deaths have been falling.   Improvements in aircraft design  have reached a stage at which it is almost inconceivable that a major incident will be the result of a mechanical failure.  Modern Airbus and Boeing planes ‘fly by wire’, which means that every action by a pilot is mediated by a computer and most of the time aircraft literally fly themselves.  Chelsey Sullenberger’s ‘miracle on the Hudson’ landing was an exceptional feat of skilled aviation, but as his Airbus landed on the river it was the machine, not the pilot, that had selected the gliding speed and angle.

The dangerous moments on a plane are when the pilot is overriding the electronic systems. They may do so for good reason, but with bad outcomes, as when the crew of Air France 447 from Rio to Paris misjudged their response to adverse weather conditions and lost the plane in the Atlantic:  or with malevolent intent , as in the Germanwings incident.  Passengers should worry, not that the crew are not in control, but that they are.

But another reason why modern air travel is reassuringly safe is that investigation into air accidents is honest and thorough. Airlines and aircraft manufacturers do not like the public exposure of defects in their products;  but they have tended to respond by addressing the defects rather than resisting the exposure.  And generally accident investigators have been allowed to do a thorough job without political interference.

        The most notable exception was the attempt by the government of Egypt, under the Mubarak dictatorship, to influence the findings of US investigators into the loss of Egyptair 990; the plane  disappeared into the North Atlantic under the control of what is widely thought to have been another suicidal pilot. And the full truth of the downing of the Malaysian Airlines flight over Ukraine is never likely to emerge.   But when President Hollande, Chancellor Merkel and Prime Minister Rahoy went to Barcelonette last week, they went to show concern and establish what had happened rather than to deflect blame.

This is the behaviour we are entitled to expect:  but it is not what we generally see. The bodies which regulate drug safety do not enjoy the same protection from interest group lobbying as air accident investigators. And so the pharmaceutical industry has largely lost the public trust achieved by the ‘just culture’ of the airline industry, which is more concerned to encourage openness  than to attribute blame.

And the contrast with finance could hardly be greater.  It is inconceivable that we might have had the dispassionate investigation of the  financial crash of 2008 that will take place into the crash in the French Alps.  To avoid mistakes in the future it is first necessary to undertake honest assessment of the mistakes of the past.  That is why our planes are getting safer, and our finances are not.