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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
It may be true that the media oversensationalizes every aviation mishap, but in some way they are merely reacting to what the public is interested in and the definition of "news".
Here are two headlines: "Fifty people killed in airline crash" and "Another 900 Americans killed in traffic fatalities during the past week." And while the second headline is factual and should stand out because of the greater loss of life, you will never see it as a headline because it is not newsworthy. The first headline is. A bus with 50 passengers going downhill that loses its brakes, with a driver that manages to bring it safely to a stop at the bottom of the hill won't even make the local news because no one was there to record it. A plane that has a mis-alligned nose wheel and makes an emergency landing makes the news because cameras are there to catch all the action as it happens.
I think another reason why people are so anxious about flying is that, no matter how statistically safe flying is, the passenger has to give up control by the very nature of being a passenger. It's the height of delusion: the person flying the plane had to go through years of training; you, if you're lucky, got a semester's of driver's ed, and are on the road with thousands of other people and variables you can't control. Yet because you "know" you're a good driver (and just about everyone "knows" that they're a good driver) you feel safe behind the wheel of a car in a way that you don't sitting in an airplane, because you don't have any influence over the situation.
Personally, I know that I'm a a terrible driver, and I haven't actually driven a car in years ... maybe that's why I don't get anxious while flying.
jf
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.
I enjoyed your article, as usual. Your comments about how airlines react to anomolies reminds me of an amusing situation I encountered several years ago in Caracas.
The aircraft to be used for the Caracas-London flight was brought to the gate well before boarding time. At Caracas the gates all have plate glass windows so passengers can see the ramp, aircraft, etc.
The boarding lounge was full of British eco-tourists on their way home. The left hand wing of the aircraft had a prominent dent in the leading edge, I guess from a bird strike. Mild interest in this on the part of the passengers quickly morphed into full scale alarm and demands that the airplane be replaced. The passengers were in an uproar by the time someone from Viasa came to the podium to announce a short delay since the flight was to be operated by a "substitute" aircraft.
Well, the relief in the boarding lounge was palpable, everyone re-assumed their holiday spirit. The plane was removed and dusk started to fall. Once the sun went down and it was not easy to see out the windows, the new aircraft was brought to the gate and everyone got on and flew uneventfully to London.
As a contractor to Viasa at the time, I knew it had only five DC-10s and no "substitute" aircraft available! We flew home on the same aircraft that had alarmed all the tourists. I have always felt this was a particularly clever way of making lemons into lemonade!
Colin Gibson
People go to horror movies. We like scary stories. We obsess about certain kinds of crimes, though the odds of being a victim may be quite slim. Maybe the problem with terrorism, which also obsesses about aviation, is that we want to be scared, anyway, so it's hard to maintain the political edge. What's a radical Islamist going to do? Doesn't AQ live within the confines of a media defined world? How does Islamism win? We'll still have MSNBC and Fox, right? No revolution maintains that essential purity. Maybe bin Laden will just get a blog, Been Loggin', or something.
It's interesting that aviation intersects so well with the emotional fabrications that define the world. What percentage of our lives is now processed news? Or fake news? Whose responsibility is it, for people to find the 'real' world? It should be part of journalistic ethics that you wouldn't create a world so distorted that people have ideas that are wildly wrong. But, it isn't.
Too bad, really. People should actually get to know the atmosphere. They should get inside the air, the wind, in a smallish contraption that they guide around, as they please. To me, the real problem with the media fantasy of aviation is that it takes away the opportunity to experience something that is quite profound. Of course, there is a lot more risk flying small aircraft.
There's a mystique about flying, and rightly so. There's a mystique about giant flying machines that overpower the ground and integrate into a complex system of commercial transport with incredible precision. They talk about the 'biz jet' syndrome, where Congressman feel that power that comes from having high speed transport on a personal level, at your command.
Maybe it's because most people are excluded that the emotional reactions are what they are? How do we go from mystique to the multiple layers of fear? The media wants to put their stamp on everything. I guess any issue has been 'media-cized' when the basic reactions to it are fear.
It's odd, isn't it, that terrorists and journalists seem to share... so much?
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
219 Democrats and one Republican join in favor of the legislation, which passed by a narrow margin
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Salon headlines in your mailbox
