I get the willies when I fly on airplanes.
Especially now.
On January 5 an Alaska Airlines flight left Portland and at 16,000 feet a door-plug blew out.
I will be flying into and out of Portland on Alaska Air.
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| Outside view |
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| Inside view |
I can imagine being on board a flight where something like that happens. Yikes!
But, for calm, rational perspective, I should remember that no one died in the incident. The planes are over-engineered. The flight crew knew what to do.
In fact, no one died anywhere in the USA in a commercial jet plane accident in 2023.
Meanwhile, for perspective, 60 people are murdered every single day in the U.S.
Covid deaths are way down, but about 60 people a day in the U.S. still die from Covid -- almost all of them people like me, over age 65.
Car accidents kill about 114 people every day in the U.S.
Drug overdoses cause the death of 300 Americans every day.
Heart disease is the leading cause of death; 1,600 Americans experience a first heart attack every day.
Even events I consider vanishingly rare are far more dangerous than flying commercial. Lightning kills two Americans every month. Bee and other insect stings kill six Americans every month.
Almost one American dies every day from an injury after falling from a ladder. I still get up on ladders to prune and pick fruit at the farm, and to do household chores like change ceiling lightbulbs, but I should probably stop. Older people reach too far or lose balance in some way, and they fall. I don't feel unsteady in the least, but the statistics tell me I am tempting fate.
The prospect of falling out of the sky is so terrifying that the commercial air travel industry has emphasized safety. That was smart and necessary. Otherwise, people wouldn't fly.
Meanwhile, Americans die every day from something other than air travel while worrying about having booked window seats. What if the side of the plane opens up? Yikes!
4 comments:
The bad news is that if the door had blown off at 36,000 feet instead of 16,000, it could have been catastrophic. The good news is the Boeing 737 MAX 9 jets remain grounded for now. May your flight be boring; the year promises to be interesting enough.
Reading several Aviation journals I've seen something of a consensus that Boeing, once considered a gold standard of Commercial Aircraft has been on a downward spiral in quality since the Management was taken over by Ivy League MBA Bean Counters, interested in only one thing, bottom line profits and Shareholder ROI. So cutting costs by laying off engineers, and highly skilled (expensive) workers has crawled their the top of Management To Do lists.
And fir the record, I wouldn't fly on a 737 today, if I were being paid. A number if these door plugs have already been found with loose or missing attachment bolts.
Every time you go downtown and don’t run into anyone you know, you don’t come home thinking, “What a big world it is.“
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