THE modern jet aircraft has a computer, two pilots and a dog, so the joke goes.

A computer to fly the plane, a pilot to reassure the passengers and a dog to bite the pilots in case they touch anything.

Hundreds of thousands of people are jetting from A to B across the world's skies at any one time and the surprising thing about air crashes is not how many there are, but how few.

An aircraft is taking off or landing somewhere on this planet virtually every second. The safety record of the aviation industry is, by and large, pretty impressive, especially in the West. (The accident rate is admittedly, higher in the developing world, particularly Africa and South America.) Horrific incidents like the Spanair crash at Madrid are mercifully rare and therefore seem all the more shocking when they do happen. Most of us, I am sure, have fleetingly envisioned ourselves in a crash landing, either when we're watching TV pictures from a disaster or while actually on a flight. But modern jets are tested to the extreme, pilots and cabin crew highly trained and the statistics show you have more chance of being killed on the roads than in an aircraft. Indeed, according to figures published yesterday, almost 3,000 people died in UK road accidents in 2007. The number of people killed in large passenger-carrying aircraft incidents in the same period? None.

We can all choose whether or not to fly, but we all have to use the roads.

Given the number of lunatics and kamikaze merchants in cars these days, I know where I'd rather take my chances.

At 30,000ft, in a Boeing somewhere over the North Atlantic.