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where the Federal Aviation Agency maintains control towers. And these airports represent only eight per cent of the nation's total civil airports! There are 2,000 airliners, 75,000 private and business aircraft and 40,000 military planes using our airspace. At any given hour, there may be as many as 70,000 human beings traveling through this airspace at speeds of up to 600 miles an hour. 
Now, weight these rather astronomical figures against the number of fatal collisions involving scheduled airlines: about half a dozen. The last one was in 1960. All this boils down to a simple statistical fact: compare the number of flights flown, say, since 1938 with the number of fatal collisions involving airliners, and the odds against such a tragedy are about one in four million. How would you like those odds for your own automobile?
No one, at least of all the airline industry, denies that faults exist in our Air Traffic Control system. But what too many people don't realize is that the faults largely result in inefficiency--in delays and inconvenience, not in danger. The system just won't accept any more traffic than it can handle safely. 
Yes, there are near-misses. They stem from inadequacies in the Air Traffic Control system to human carelessness or human error. But near-misses should be kept in perspective. They literally are accidents that did NOT happen. And many times, they did not happen simply because safeguards built into the system recognized whatever mistake was made and soon enough to correct the error.