The nine-seat aircraft, which runs on a single turboprop engine, was so small that the ground crew had to weigh luggage and passengers in order to distribute their weight evenly in the cabin. It was, in short, the kind of plane that makes it easy to fear for your life. Louis to Chicago. Just a few days later, an American Airlines regional jet collided with a U. Army Black Hawk helicopter in Washington, D.
The National Transportation Safety Board has said it will take at least a year to identify a final probable cause of the crash. Until then, one can only guess that the aircrafts and their machinery were not themselves to blame. The New York Times has reported that the relevant air-traffic-control tower may have been understaffed and that the helicopter might have been outside its flight path.
Statistically, for now at least, flying is still much safer than driving. According to the International Air Transport Association, on average a person would have to travel by plane every day for more than , years before experiencing a fatal accident. A host of factors has made flying more reliable, among them more dependable equipment, better pilot training, tighter regulations, stricter maintenance standards, advances in air-traffic control, and improved weather forecasting.
But the amorphous, interlocking systems that realize commercial flight are hard to see or understand, even as they keep us safe. For ordinary passengersโpeople like me and my sonโany sense of danger tends to focus on the plane itself, because the plane is right in front of us, and above our heads, and underneath our feet, and lifting us up into the sky. A fear of flying makes little sense, because flying is just physics. One really fears airplanes , the aluminum tubes in which a fragile human body may be trapped while it is brought into flight.
A machine like that can crash. A machine like that can kill you. In , another engine detachment on a DC wide-body jet caused the crash of American Airlines Flight In , an Aloha Airlines Boeing lost an foot-long section of upper fuselage on the way from Hilo to Honolulu.
