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failure to land, results in a situation fairly comparable to that of an automobile trip delayed for the same reason, rather than in one ascribable to any undue inherent hazard pertaining to the new conveyance. 
Flying offers little prospect of ever becoming safe to the extent of relieving one from the common chances of life and death, but it does most emphatically promise that its hazards per passenger mile will not exceed the corresponding hazards of land and water transportation. The railroads of the United States alone exact an annual toll of 12,000 persons killed and 72,000 injured, yet many very timid individuals think nothing of riding for hours at a time, at a speed of sixty miles an hour along the top of precipitous embankments and over high trestles, with their safety never for a moment independent of somewhat precarious hold of thin wheel flanges on the smooth edges of narrow rails. Thus does familiarity breed contempt. People are prone to appraise casualty by its horror rather than by its statistics, and the thought of one individual tumbling from the skies grips harder on the popular imagination than the slaughter of a few score in a railway accident or the drowning of a few hundreds in a shipwreck. 
The statistics for 1922 are very illuminating in this respect. In the United States alone, 6,500,000 miles were flown and 350,000 persons carried. Twenty-eight fatal accidents occurred, eighteen of which were traceable to carelessness in operation and to stunt flying. This record will stand comparison with any other method of transportation in its embryo stages. An interesting phase of the argument is the fact that everyone considered the automobile a more or less safe mode of travel, yet statistics show the casualties to