Personally, I don't consider it a huge priority; I guess that makes me a bit of an exception (in this crowd, at least).

Flying on a commercial airliner is extremely safe; if you boarded an airliner at random every day from the time you were born until your 100th birthday, your chance of being in a fatal accident would be less than 4% and even then, you'd probably survive.

Still, (stuff) happens. There was a crash of an Airbus in the French Alps some years ago. Some genius of an engineer decided that one of the aircraft instruments would serve double duty - if it was in one mode, it allowed the pilot to enter a rate of descent in feet per minute; in the other mode, the pilot entered the angle of descent in degrees. The pilots entered an angle of descent of 3.000 degrees; the aircraft instead went into a 3000 foot per minute descent. With dozens (perhaps hundreds) of instruments to look at, the pilots had virtually no chance of spotting that the decimal point on one single display was missing. So much for taking the human out of the loop. <img src="images/graemlins/shocked.gif" alt="" />

The plane slammed into the ground and broke apart; there were quite a few survivors, but it took something like 5 hours for authorities to locate the wreckage. In fact, it was a news reporter and camera crew who found the crash site and directed the authorities.

So, how inconvenient is it for me to stick an Altoids tin in my jacket pocket? The main inconvenience is going through the security check. It's a personal decision as to whether the inconvenience of explaining why you need 15 feet of snare wire and a mag-flint block to a skeptical security guard is worth it to you. For many on this forum, it is. YMMV <img src="images/graemlins/cool.gif" alt="" />