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What I'm going to appeal to is your sense of logic, your inherent fairness, your ability to judge facts. And right off the bat, I'm going to admit one thing: Flying, like everything else we do, has an element of danger. 

Now, having conceded that flying can be hazardous -- by all the rules of inevitable logic -- I think we also can assume that flying is not the only sinner. There is an element of risk in virtually everything we do. People get killed taking baths, driving automobiles, taking walks, riding bicycles, smoking cigarettes. 

In a sense, nothing in this world of ours is completely, totally, 100 per cent safe. Not even sitting in a house, just eating and sleeping, and never going out. Safety in itself is merely the art of reducing risk to the lease possible change of occurrence. And THIS is why I believe in our product ... why I am so proud to be a part of an industry whose slogan, philosophy, and even religion can be summed up in that one word: safety. The art of reducing risk to the least possible chance of occurrence. And if you think I'm exaggerating the use of such phrases as "philosophy and even religion," I would like to cite just one little item: Three years ago, when the scheduled domestic airlines LOST 32 million dollars in a 12-month period, they still spent more than 400 million dollars maintaining their aircraft in accordance with standards higher than those required by the federal government! 

We in the industry are only too well aware of the fact that some Americans are afraid to fly. The U.S. scheduled airlines carried more than 70 million passengers last year. But many of these were repeaters. In other words, the airlines sold more than 70 million individual tickets, but they carried a much