You know the saying "what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas." To that end, I have long advised clients to let crashes that happen elsewhere stay elsewhere. Safety standards vary. In some cases, the differences are like night and day. If you are worrying about a crash in a country where you never fly, or at an airline you never fly on, you are worrying for no good reason.

Safety standards - the measures that make aviation safe - are similar in advanced countries like U.S., Canada, the U.K., Europe, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. If you fly only in these countries, events elsewhere are irrelevant. But if you do fly in other parts of the world, differences in safety need to be considered.

There is a fairly simple way to consider these standards. Since aviation standards are usually high where medical standards are high, consider where you would feel comfortable about medical treatment. If you could get an operation cheaper in another country, would you? If you were traveling in another country and needed medical attention, would you get treatment there or go elsewhere? If you would avoid medical treatment in XYZ country, I suggest you avoid airlines based in XYZ country.

There has just been a crash in Korea. Its aviation standards are generally good. But Korea has a unique problem. There are few airports where pilots can practice hand-flying an airliner. According to some reports, the average amateur pilot in the U.S. is better at hand-flying than the average professional pilot in Korea.

Lack of hand-flying skills played a role in the crash of Korea-based Asiana Airlines flight 214 at San Francisco airport on July 6, 2013. It was a beautiful sunny day, the kind of day your doctor or lawyer might be flying their Cessna for fun. But there was a problem. The ILS transmitter antenna was being relocated. There were no ILS signals for the auto pilot to use to land the plane. That would have been no problem for pilots at most airlines. But for these pilots, landing the plane by hand was more than they could handle.

The captain was in the left seat. An instructor pilot was in the right seat. A copilot was in the jump seat. To make sure planes don't land short of the runway, the aiming spot for landing is a quarter mile past the end of the runway. As incredible as it seems, these airline pilots failed to do what amateur pilots do routinely. They crashed onto the sea wall. The sea wall is over a quarter of a mile from where the plane should have landed. The plane then slid forward onto the runway. When it came to a stop, all the passengers were able to get out of the plane. Tragically, a firetruck arriving at the scene ran over two passengers.

This accident should help make it clear that when worrying about flying, what happens elsewhere needs to stay elsewhere.

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