This morning I woke up, made a cup of coffee, picked up my tablet, and took a quick look at Twitter. The following was in my twitter feed via retweet:

Huh, that’s interesting. We do often see media blowing things out of proportion. See: Ebola in the United States panic this fall. I was about to move on before I noticed the scale on the upper left.

2014 had less than 500 deaths? That can’t be. The two Malaysian Air lines planes that went down this summer (one shot down and one lost entirely) had to have accounted for more than 500 deaths just together. They had no survivors.

Then I noticed the lower right corner.

So I get things getting safer year over year, but there is no way that 2014 actually had an order of magnitude drop in crashes in one year. 10% decrease seems plausible, but not 80% drop.

That’s because this infographic is from March (which makes a ton more sense). It’s publication date is March 10, so we’re really looking at 1/6 of a year at best in that final bar.

Note: the original author completely refuses to acknowledge he was wrong over the course of the twitter thread. Self denial is amazing.

This CNN article from right after the Ukrainian flight was lost on CNN accounts for 761 deaths so far as of end of July.

This year is still going to end up with less deaths than most years, it will look more like the early 2000s, and less like 2013. Not the worst year on record, but definitely not the safest either.