Site Presented By
Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
The federal government is warning us about possible new attacks on airliners. Is it safe to fly? The pilot also shares his own opinion on the question of flight simulators and terrorism.
Aug 1, 2003 | Over the last 22 months, the ramifications of terrorism and war laid waste to the airlines' balance sheets. It has been nothing less than the worst financial scorching the business has seen since pilots wore leather helmets and delivered the mail in biplanes. Among pilots alone, the industry demographic I happen to have been towed out and sunk with, more than ten thousand of us remain unemployed.
One war and a pseudo recession later, it's August, 2003. Flights are full, fares are down, confidence is up. Relatively, of course. And practically on cue from the bunkers of our reticent, occasionally incomprehensible administration, comes yet another travel warning. Al-Qaida, the intercepted messages and payrolled tipsters inform us, is once again targeting U.S. airliners either domestically or overseas.
We can argue whether the government's wolf cries are tactical ass covering or merely a convenient way to keep the populace pliable and its civil liberties ripe for plucking, but one of these days they're going to get lucky, as it were. And when it happens there's much to lose. The airlines obviously know this, but it's the frontline workers who fear it most. Shareholders in a paneled boardroom may end up setting their portfolios on the curbside with the trash, but it's the pilots and flight attendants, mechanics and agents, who'll be picking through it all, looking for scraps of food.
People would shun flying as never before. Airports would be virtual lockdowns and Amnesty International would declare the metal detectors and x-ray zones in violation of the Geneva Convention. To put it one way, the industry would implode. I don't know what the government is thinking, nor do I know what an al-Qaida operative in a cave near the Khyber Pass -- or a suburban basement in Missouri -- might have in mind. It's impossible to doubt our sworn enemies are busy scheming, but I can tell you I'm skeptical of one thing, which is the likelihood of another suicide hijacking. Terrorists wielding sharply hewn weapons disguised as cameras, one of the news stories explains, are a possible scenario. I say bull, and it's this kind of thing -- stubborn allegiance to the Sept. 11 template -- that make the repeated warnings sound annoyingly dubious. I can't imagine a potential hijacker, armed with anything less than 12 sticks of dynamite, making it two steps up the aisle, never mind through the cockpit door.
And where would it happen? It remains my hunch that however focused we are domestically, any target will be a flight overseas. Since U.S. carriers no longer visit any cities in the Middle East or Africa (with the exception of Continental to Tel Aviv), I look toward South America and the Caribbean as easier-access targets than Europe or Asia. The enemy's most powerful weapon is surprise, and who thinks about Lima, Sao Paolo, Santo Domingo or Montego Bay?
Of course, the citizenship of the airline needn't be America to invoke another paralyzing round of fear and panic. Consider British Airways, whose jets call in places all through the Middle East, India, and deep into Africa. Several weeks ago BA suspended its routes to Kenya when it received word of threats there.
Should you, the passenger whose vested interest isn't a paycheck, but his or her life, be worried? Even under worst-case conditions, which is basically where we're at, I'll tell you no. It depends if you're the type who takes the lottery seriously or worries about being struck by lightning. Bill James, the baseball academic, likes to say, "Never use a number when you can avoid it." Normally I think he's right, and if you're a regular to these pages you'll know I don't enjoy dishing out numerical platitudes. But these aren't normal times, and people, even me, are a little nervous. Not about dying, but about the plague of fear that we're on the verge of propagating. I'll choose something like this, which you can almost visualize:
At major airports across America, airplanes come and go at a rate approaching 100 per hour. Every day in this country, the major airlines and their affiliates alone operate more than fifteen thousand flight segments. This happens every day, every week, every month. Just in the United States. Of these, almost none fail in their attempt to successfully defy gravity. During calendar year 2002, not a single fatality was recorded among the country's commercial airlines -- five million takeoffs and landings by the biggest carriers alone. It's not always so impressive, but it's always close.
Analyzing the threat of hostilities, it's relatively easy to warp the probabilities: a New York to London flight, maybe, is a higher profile target than Tucson to Denver. Then again, you never know. Dulles to Los Angeles and Newark to San Francisco didn't have much cachet either, and look what happened to them. That's not saying all flights are dangerous. On the contrary, in sifting the numbers, it proves most are safe.
Statistics show us that even if we suffered a 747 crash every Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday promptly at noon, the chance of dying aloft is still remarkably remote. While I sense that I'm naïve for asking you to behave in deference to the odds, I'm afraid that's all I can do.
Earlier this year, Michael Flannagan and Michael Sivak of American Scientist magazine conducted a study to reevaluate the old flying-v-driving contention. In the end, their data showed that if a passenger chooses to drive, rather than fly, the length of a typical nonstop flight segment (just over 1,100 kilometers), he is now 65 times more likely to be killed.
In light of this week's news, I'll leave you with the last words of Flannagan's and Sivak's report:
"For flying to become as risky as driving, disastrous airline incidents on the scale of those of September 11th would have [to occur] about once a month. "The relative safety of domestic flying on the major airlines over driving is so strong that the direction of the advantage would be unchanged unless the toll of terrorism in the air became, almost unthinkably, many times worse than it has been."
So splash some cold water on that television. Your enemy is the scaremonger and his seed of fear, as much as any lurking terrorist.
