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Seems to me a reason that people think flying is dangerous is that in days of yore, it was. When a Pan Am Clipper took off from a dock on San Francisco bay to island-hop across the Pacific, there was a not-insignificant chance that it would never show up at the other end. The giant flying boats of the air had four or six engines so that they could be reasonably confident that three or four of them would work all the way to the next pit stop.
People don't appreciate how much more reliable jets are than prop planes, or how much more reliable modern jet engines are than the ones on a 707 or DC-8 or a Comet. Reporters (present company of course excepted) are only human, the folklore is passed along in the newsroom, so by golly if plane travel was dangerous and big news when we wrote about it in 1937, it still is now.
