You’re much more likely to die on your way to the airport than while you’re flying, right? Airplanes are the safest form of travel, correct? Some people fly five or six flights every day — pilots, flight attendants, etc. — and they’re not dead, so flying must be safe, huh?

I have to tell myself all these things when I fly in an airplane because I am incredibly afraid of flying. No, that’s not quite true. I’m not all that afraid of flying, it just kind of spooks me out. All those weird noises, the whirring and knocking, make my body tense up and my palms get sweaty.

Then I run those rational lines of sentences through my head in an attempt to calm my frayed nerves, and it usually has a soothing effect because I realize that my fears are not grounded in logic. I settle in to my cramped blue seat and try to submerge myself in a magazine or book.

But my mind always wanders to thoughts of the pilots up in the cockpit and what they are thinking, what their worries are and their level of sobriety. About 90 minutes into most flights, I’ve finally convinced myself the plane is not going to crash — just in time for the teeth-clenching landing.

I think a lot of people are in the same boat as me. We know planes are safe, and we don’t have any qualms about flying. Until we get on the plane, of course, and feel the immense power of the flying machine rumbling underneath us.

We’re the kind of folks who don’t especially like to read about plane crashes, let alone seem them on TV, because we know it’s going to make it that more difficult the next time we step off the tarmac.

Now, we’ve got something else to worry about.

A study done in the spring and summer of 1997 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology of the two major airports in the Dallas-Forth Worth area showed that two-thirds of the nearly 2,000 pilots who encountered severe weather while they were in flight flew straight in to the storm.

Even scarier, 90 percent of pilots encountering severe weather within 15 miles of the airport, 266 out of 297, flew into the storm as well.

And these weren’t some light showers spreading a gentle mist all around the metal skin of the giant, man-made bird, these were intense thunderstorms that can knock a plane out of the sky with the same ease Bill Gates can crush an Internet start-up.

These were storms that produce microbursts, those nasty little pockets of wind shear that fool pilots into driving their planes into a nose dive.

This is a problem the airline industry has dealt with before. In 1985, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) mandated new training for all commercial pilots on how to deal with severe weather. According to an article in Wednesday’s USA Today, the breadth of the FAA’s training was “avoid, avoid, avoid” severe weather.

So why, a mere 15 years later, are pilots ignoring this prudent advice?

The study suggests that much of the ill-advised piloting comes from a desire to land planes on time. Researchers found pilots that were already running at least 15 minutes behind were much more likely to fly into the storm.

And many of the pilots interviewed about the study have cited an unspoken element of peer pressure which drives pilots to push their aircraft to the limit, as no one wants to be the weenie who’s afraid to fly into the storm.

I can understand that. From all I’ve seen, read and heard about pilots, they’re in general a macho bunch, the sorts of guys who insist on being the best and enjoy living on the edge. However, I thought the death-wish pilots flew space shuttles and experimental planes, not DC-10s from Des Moines to Milwaukee.

Not that the pilots who decided to bite the bullet and turn away were any safer. Researchers showed that many pilots who did choose to err on the side of caution made the decision way too late and by turning their planes abruptly before landing often put their aircraft right in the path of the storm again.

The question that needs to be asked is, “Why are these pilots so concerned about landing on time?” Surely there are SOME masculinity issues at stake here (at least with the male pilots). I’ve seen commercial pilots, though, and they are definitely not the type who concern themselves with having the “right stuff.”

My guess is that it is pressure from the top trickling down. With the competition between airlines reaching levels of intensity unseen in 1970s and 1980s, the more a company lands their birds on time, the more customers they’ll be able to pack in their jets.

Consumers just fuel the problem by insisting planes land on time and throwing a big stink when they don’t. Listen up those of you ranting like madmen when you’re forced to stay in Tulsa overnight, transporting humans 35,000 feet above the ground at speeds of more than 500 mph is not as simple as it seems.

We all need to settle down and realize, yes, planes are the most safe and reliable form of transportation, but from time to time they are going to be late, especially if the windows of the airport terminals are rattling because of high winds.

Constant consumer pressure to make airlines more clockwork will not work, in the end it will only drive pilots to madness and planes into corn fields.

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David Roepke is a junior in journalism and mass communication from Aurora. He is a news editor at the Daily.