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Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
What's more dangerous, an in-flight decompression, or reading about one? Somebody please pass the pilot some oxygen.
Aug 26, 2005 | Air disasters, like celebrity deaths and tropical storms, seem to happen in threes. No sooner were the flames doused in Toronto when a Cypriot 737 went down in bizarre fashion on Aug. 14, followed two days later by an MD-80 in Venezuela.
Make that fours. We shouldn't forget the Tunisian turboprop that crashed in the Mediterranean on Aug. 6. News coverage was sparse, but 13 people died after the ATR-72 ditched in choppy seas off the Sicilian coast.
Such weird statistical bunchings are prone to make us skittish, though it's imperative to bear in mind that a handful of accidents does not, in the context of tens of thousands of daily departures, measurably impact the odds of being in a crash. According to the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), the global accident rate a quarter century ago was three fatal incidents per million flights. By 2004 the rate was one-sixth of that, at 0.5 incidents per million. The recent series of casualties, while unusual, is unlikely to skew the long-term data.
That's the left brain talking. Speeding down the runway, we tend to be at the mercy of that other, less rational hemisphere. Regardless of what the calculator shows, the majority of travelers are never fully at ease when sitting on a plane, and there's nothing like a spate of tragedies to push already squeamish flyers over the edge. Four events in two weeks was enough to prompt the BBC to ask, "Is flying still the safest way to travel?"
The answer, of course, is yes, though voices of reason and reassurance have been few. Amid growing angst, the last thing people need is incendiary misinformation from the news media, and regrettably that's what they're getting. As reviewed in this space on Aug. 12, the accuracy of reports following the Air France debacle were tolerable at best. Then, just as the story began to fade came the terrible crashes in Sicily, Greece and Venezuela. Each of those was a media botchery waiting to happen, their mysterious circumstances taking in the full encyclopedia of aviation's most misunderstood buzzwords -- things like "decompression" and "engine failure."
Enter the usual suspects, from the Associated Press to the network anchors, who this time truly managed to outdo themselves.
The worst of the lot comes from the scorched hillside north of Athens, unintended terminus of Helios Airways flight 522, a tourist charter en route between Larnaca, Cyprus, and the Czech capital of Prague. All 121 passengers and crew were killed when the Boeing 737-300 went down after a possible in-flight decompression.
But what exactly is a decompression, and what are its consequences? As you might expect, those vary greatly, but an Aug. 15 dispatch from the Associated Press, written by correspondent Elana Becatoros and prominently splashed on front pages worldwide, included this explanation from Chris Yates, aviation analyst at Jane's Transport: "If the airplane lost cabin pressure ... effectively everybody would be doomed with a short space of time."
Having stumbled across this nugget over breakfast, I quietly put my bagel down and wondered if the time hadn't come to give up the fight -- to at last hurl my Macintosh out the window and perhaps stick my head in the oven. (Instead I went and listened to an old Hüsker Dü song, "Crystal," with its line, "Sucked out of the first class window!") Note the ellipsis points, included in the story as shown above. Giving Chris Yates benefit of the doubt, and assuming he's cognizant of the many potential variants of decompression, which we'll get to in a minute, we're forced to assume Becatoros omitted the necessary qualifiers for the sake of punch and pith. In doing so she offers us a snippet of utter nonsense.
Two days later came another outrageous summation, this time courtesy of the AP's Derek Gatopoulos. "Decompression would cause a rapid loss of oxygen on board," Gatopoulos informs us, "giving passengers and crew a few seconds before losing consciousness amid subzero temperatures. Death would be minutes behind."
And there we have it: Becatoros and Gatopoloulos, tied neck and neck for providing two of the most luridly renegade statements I've encountered in all my years of vetting crash accounts.
