6. Aug. 19, 1980. A Saudia L-1011 bound for Karachi returns to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, following an in-flight fire that broke out just after departure. For reasons never understood, the crew takes its time after a safe touchdown and rolls to the far end of the runway before finally stopping. No evacuation is commenced, and the airplane then sits with its engines running for more than three minutes. Before any doors can be opened by the inadequately equipped rescue workers at Riyadh, all 301 people on the wide-body die as the passenger cabin is consumed by a flash fire.

7. July 3, 1988. An Airbus A300 operated by Iran Air is shot down over the Straits of Hormuz by the USS Vincennes. The crew of the Vincennes, distracted by an ongoing gun battle, mistakes the A300 for a hostile military aircraft and destroys it with two surface-to-air missiles. None of the 290 occupants survived.

8. May 25, 1979. As an American Airlines DC-10 lifts from the runway at Chicago's O'Hare Airport, an engine detaches and seriously damages a wing. Before its crew can make sense of the situation, the airplane rolls 90 degrees and disintegrates in a huge fireball about a mile beyond the runway. With 273 fatalities, this remains the worst-ever crash on U.S. soil. Both the engine pylon design and airline maintenance procedures were faulted by NTSB investigators, and all DC-10s were temporarily grounded.

9. Dec. 21, 1988. Two Libyan agents are later held responsible (one is convicted) for planting a bomb aboard Pan American Flight 103, which blows up in the night sky over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270 people, including 11 on the ground.

10. Sept. 1, 1983. Korean Air Lines Flight KL007, a 747 carrying 269 passengers and crew from New York to Seoul, Korea (with a technical stop in Anchorage), is shot down by a Soviet fighter after drifting off course -- and into Soviet airspace -- near Sakhalin Island in the North Pacific. The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) later attributes the mysterious deviation to "A considerable degree of lack of alertness and attentiveness on the part of the flight crew."

These accidents comprise 12 airplanes and 10 airlines. Pan Am, now of course defunct but for decades one of the world's highest-profile companies, played a role in two of them, as did the lesser-known Saudia (today called Saudi Arabian Airlines). In Saudia's case, the company was absolved of blame in the midair collision (see No. 3), but its crew acted inexplicably in the fire at Riyadh (see No. 6). An interesting breakdown also includes the following:

Number of Boeing 747s involved in the 10 crashes: 7
Number resulting from terrorist sabotage or that were shot down mistakenly: 4
Number that occurred in the United States: 1
Number that occurred prior to 1974: 0
Number that occurred during the 1970s or 1980s: 9
Number in which pilot error can be cited as a direct or contributing cause: 3
Number that crashed as direct result of mechanical failure: 3

To reduce these events to numerical abstraction can seem a cheap dissection. By using cold numbers, for instance, one could surmise that the 747 is the most dangerous plane in the sky, neglecting the fact that it also carries the highest number of passengers in a single wallop. Still, we find some interesting and unexpected points, not the least of which is the lack of crew error in all but three of the 10 disasters. This is particularly intriguing to pilots, considering the amount of human-factors analysis that's forced down our throats in training. Design flaws in the case of the DC-10 catastrophes in Chicago and Paris, meanwhile, play into many passengers' fears of bizarre mechanical failures diagnosed by this same author as "irrational." Those of you looking for some corporate negligence can cite the mistakes of JAL, and all of us can sigh nervously over what remains to be done in the wake of bombings against Pan Am and Air India.

Glean what you will, and granted there are lessons we're yet to learn, but remember that in the U.S. alone some 30,000 commercial airplanes depart and land safely each day. If I may borrow from a previous article of my own: The annals of commercial aviation -- more or less an 80-year history -- are full of accidents, a fact that is, however frustrating, inherent in the evolution of technology and safety. We should learn to be more comfortable with this. For in spite of such, the numbers remain firmly on your side, by a wide-enough margin that none of us should be dissuaded from taking to the skies.

Do you have questions for Salon's aviation expert? Send them to AskThePilot and look for answers in a future column.

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