Peter Pigott - Brace for Impact: Air Crashes and Aviation Safety

Wreckage of the Canso flying boat brought ashore, Lac Deschnes, July 1945. Library and Archives Canada .

By the time boats from the yacht club got to the crash, the scene was marked by floating logbooks, oil slicks, and bodies. Killed were five crew members, with two men injured. What was left of the flying boat was dragged up onto the shore, and the wreckage was sent to the RCAF station at Trenton. The squadron was disbanded a month later, and in the euphoria of VJ Day, what happened that summer afternoon on the Ottawa River fell through the cracks, remaining only in the memories of those who, like the old woman, had witnessed it.

Air disasters were much in the news in 2014, as the death toll in commercial aviation multiplied four times over the previous years numbers. The tragedies that befell the two Malaysia Airlines aircraft in March and July had resulted in the deaths of all 537 people on board. By years end, when 1,183 passengers and crew had died in air crashes, one could be forgiven for assuming 2014 was the worst year in aviation history.

But that wasnt the case. It is just that people have short memories. In 1998, there had been 1,242 fatalities; in 1996, 1,845; and in 1985, 1,283 were killed. Even worse were the 1970s, when in both 1972 and 1973 aviation deaths topped 2,000. With the Internet and satellite-feed television coverage, there is nothing more telegenic than the shattered, smoking remnants of an airliner with the passengers personal effects strewn about the landscape. It is little wonder that aviation is thought of as inherently unsafe. Perhaps humans werent meant to rattle around in a metal tube at 33,000 feet, and the fear of flying (especially fear of crashing) affects us all. A high-risk endeavour such as this, we tell ourselves, was never meant to be error-free or entirely safe.

I knew the statistics better than anyone: that the death risk for passengers on commercial airlines is 1 in 45 million flights, that flying is the safest mode of transport, and that youre more likely to die from falling out of bed than in a plane crash. As sociologist Barry Glassner noted in his book The Culture of Fear , in the entire history of commercial aviation, fewer than 13,000 people have died in airplane crashes. Four times that many Americans lose their lives in automobile accidents in a single year. With the Malaysian Airlines tragedies following each other so quickly, the electronic media discovered what newspaper editors had known since the 1920s: that because air crashes are so infrequent (compared with the daily carnage on the highways), when they do happen, they make for gut-wrenching, fear-inducing headlines and dramatic images. We live in a world of the visually sensational rather than intelligent discourse, and every story of planes crashing due to metal fatigue, turbulence, or just vanishing only serves to confirm our sense of flight as unnatural, uncomfortable, and inevitably catastrophic.