The prospect of automobile and airplane accidents are different psychologically because of 1. control or lack of and 2. survivability.
If you’ve ever watched people disembarking from a commercial flight, you might notice that everybody is wearing a face upon which is etched a combination of triumph and relief. Also, mark their behavior during a landing. The atmosphere is tense, and the tension immediately lifts once the plane has come to a stop.
We are currently obsessed with aircraft disasters because its merely a metaphor for a bigger disaster. Kind of Freudian, I guess... We have someone leading the Ship of State into the ground, purposely wrecking the Republic, while appearing to upwards of half the population of anything but that. What are the rest of us to do while the plane goes into the ground? Well, obsess over aircraft disasters.
Fear of heights.
Because of the time it takes for the tragedy to unfold - an automobile accident is over in a matter of seconds - little time to anticipate and panic - but just the thought of having five minutes to become aware that your are inevitably going to crash and die, and imagining the horror this anticipation would bring on, is enough to make one think twice of flying......
In ages past, I think ship-wrecks and sinkings evoked the same kinds of fear. There were a lot of people sailing in ships who could not swim.
The proper way to compare air travel safety and auto safety is not by looking at deaths per mile. A real comparison is deaths per trip. If you get on the conveyance will you get off alive?
A cursory look says about 15,000 passenger flights per day. Let’s call that 50,000 to be generous. That’s a lot of flights. That’s also a drop in the bucket compared to the number of car trips.
Cars safe. Air travel much less safe. Get in a car and the odds of exiting the car alive are high. Get on a plane and the odds of exiting the plane alive are not as high.
When you fly, you are putting your life into the hands of many strangers of questionable competence. From the person who designed the aircraft and software to the mechanic who maintains it to the pilot who flies it to the air traffic controller who directs the flight. Plus you are surrounded by strange people, any of which could decide at some moment to kill everyone. It is amazing in a way that flying is so safe.
You fly the airplane.
The number of people who die in the United States on the tables of the CHOICE clinics is roughly on average 1,000,000 people a year.
Because we love our machines.
Aircraft and ocean-going ships are often some of our most beautiful creations.
To see them destroyed is heart-breaking. To think someone would wreck them deliberately is scary.
I think we already know where this investigation is leading.
My response.
Everyone wants to die on his own terms, and a plane crash removes that opportunity in a relatively short period of time with an equally short warning.