T18skyguy wrote:
I've also never considered the Boeing 737 I climb into every week to commute for work very survivable in a crash either, but I still do it for some reason.
This gave me a chuckle. I'm a pilot, but I have always known there's not a lot of sense in getting into an aluminum tube, 30,000 feet in the air, and going 600 mph. But we accept the risk. Overdrive magazine interviewed a retiring trucker who received an award for 3 million miles with no tickets or accident. They asked what the most important thing you can do for safety. His reply was " If you drive just a bit slower than the rest of traffic, it will open a large gap in front of you. That gap is a lifeline" That's something we can do. There's always going to be risk. If we don't accept it, and stay at home in our recliners, now they say that is as bad as smoking. So there's risk in just staying home too so we might as well enjoy life.
These are thoughtful posts. Once you realize that just living life has risks involved the question really becomes what is your risk tolerance. The data that I have seen is that there are on average 26,000 people killed each year on our roads in cars, about 26 per year in MH's. If you normalize it for miles driven 3 times more people die in cars than MH's. Off course air travel is much safer and fewer people get killed by sharks also, but many people won't fly due to fear of crashes or scuba dive because of sharks. If you look closer at what causes these fatalities you will see alcohol makes up 1/3 of these numbers, youthful drivers and rural roads vs urban roads make up a large percent also. I think most MH drivers are older, don't drink and drive and do more hiway driving rather than rural roads increasing there odds of a safe trip. Having said that facts or data means little when someone has fear of something. My wife has always been fearful of MH travel especially on mountainous roads. Coming back from a trip out west in 2017 I had a ball joint failure coming around a sharp corner at 60 mph in MT. When the ball joint failed and the tire blew I thought the MH was going to flip over, fortunately the MH stayed upright. The accident was caused by a shop putting in the wrong ball joint the previous year. After spending $5,000 and competently rebuilding the front end, no amount of logic or data could convince her to take another trip, so my days of MH travel are over. So my advice is do what ever makes your wife more comfortable. On edit we have not gone on a scuba diving trip since we bought the MH 15 years ago and she informed me that we were too old now, my grand son wanted to learn how to dive so she agreed to go and she had a good time she even dove with sharks again. Sometimes wives will listen to others before their own husbands.
