Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder.

It's Tuesday the 10th of October and I am writing about risk and flying.

It's a subject that clearly am very, very focused on because we are extraordinarily

fortunate to be living at a time when aviation has achieved a degree of safety that any other form

of transport I think would be very hard pressed to find.

And in particular, UK and Irish Airlines are very, very safe, the safest I would say in the world.

Two safest airlines in fact are Ryanair, which has flown more people without a fatal

accident than any other airline, followed shortly by EasyJet, which has also flown many hundreds

of millions of people safely. So they are very safe. British Airways, Virgin Atlantic and other UK airlines

are also extremely safe. But I've been looking at a warning from an organisation called Ops Group.

Now this is not an official organisation in the sense that it's not tied up with

their governments or anything. It simply represents the interests of pilots, of dispatchers,

of anybody involved in aviation operations, and that's a very good thing to do but they have come out with

really quite a strident warning about flights in and out of Israel you will be aware that

given the horrific attack by Hamas on Israel and given the awful consequences that are playing out there that

this is a war zone and Ops Group says the risk of a passenger aircraft becoming a casualty

of this war is high that's a very stark warning and

they say Israel is now an active war zone as such all lessons learned regarding civil

operations in conflict zones over the last nine years since MH17 need to be applied.

And I probably don't need to remind you that in the summer of 2014,

Boeing 777 flying for Malaysia Airlines from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur was shot down over occupied

eastern Ukraine by a Buk anti-aircraft missile that belonged to the Russian army and all 298

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