It is barely 10 months since Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared from radar screens while flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, with no trace since of the Boeing 777 or its 227 passengers and 12 crew.

Only four months later, on July 17, 283 passengers and 15 crew died when another Malaysian Airlines jet, MH17, was shot down over Ukraine while en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur.

More than 220 more people have died in airline disasters in Nepal, Taiwan, Iran and the Mali desert this year.

And now 155 passengers and seven crew are lost, feared dead, after AirAsia Flight QZ8501 lost contact with  Jakarta air traffic control on Sunday while en route from Surabaya to Singapore.

Such a succession of tragedies undoubtedly has some impact on the confidence of the flying public, says Dr Judy Hyde, from the school of psychology at the University of Sydney.

"Normally we have a protective mechanism: it's not going to happen to me," Dr Hyde says.

This defence is bolstered by the reality that most aviation disasters involve airlines that relatively few Australians have flown with, including AirAsia, she believes.

But the protective mechanism is challenged by a repetition of accidents, particularly if Australians are among the victims. There were 38 Australian citizens or residents on MH17 and another six on MH370.

No Australians were on the AirAsia flight that vanished on Sunday. Consequently, significantly less anxiety would be felt in Australia.

Associate Professor Peter Gibbens, director of learning and teaching at Sydney University's school of aerospace, argues: "People have to remember that the odds of anything happening in air are far lower than in a car."

David Ropeik, a risk expert at Harvard University, found in 2006 that the odds of dying in a plane crash were one in 11 million. The odds of dying in a car crash were one in 5000.  Arnold Barnett, a professor of statistic at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, did not want to diminish the tragedy of  air disaster, but wrote that "a traveller could on average fly once a day for 4 million years before succumbing to a fatal crash".

Most people understand the low risk and maintain their faith in aviation, Associate Professor Gibbens says.