How can air travel be so safe if the aircraft skin is only 1-2 mm thick? Aircraft skin is not very thick at all, yet air travel is the safest form of travel. All aviation professionals know why, but most occupants of an airliner are not professionals. How can it be explained to members of the general public that 1 mm is enough to:


Keep the air pressure in.
Keep the wings from breaking off.
Transport the passengers in greater safety than when they travel in their car.


I've used examples like "you can stand on a full beer can but not on an empty one". What are the secrets of aeroplane construction that makes such a seemingly flimsy construction so safe?

Update

How is a stressed skin construction explained to the general public? Lots of non-experts get quite alarmed when they are thinking of crushing a beer can.
Simple maths. Cut a cabin in two, lengthwise, and check the forces involved. The halves are held together by 4mm of aluminium, and need to withstand a pressure differential wrt to the outside over the diameter of the cabin.

Let's assume that we have a wide body plane of 6m diameter (larger than a Boeing 777), and a pressure differential of 1atm (of course, usually a plane only maintains up to 0.8atm and does not fly in a vacuum, but let's have some safety margin).

The resulting tensile stress is then about 150MPa. Aluminium only yields at 275MPa.

Other forces are carried by struts, spars and in the case of the fuselage, stringers. The skin transfers shear forces between those perpendicular stringers, but I do not think those forces are significant compared to pressure loading.