Rushing to Judgment
Aug. 16, 2005 — -- There's no sense sugar coating the reality: Airline flying is essentially an unnatural act that requires blind trust and a complete surrender of control. That's why whenever something goes wrong, there's a collective shudder in the public consciousness and a very real need for rapid reassurance that whatever just happened will not happen to us when we fly!
Interestingly enough, long periods of perfectly safe operation in the airline industry just make this reaction worse, as we saw last week with the Toronto crash of an Air France Airbus A-340, or on Sunday with the crash of Helios Airways flight ZU522, an Boeing 737, north of Athens.
The basic facts of the Helios crash are still being worked out today. But we do know something about the Air France accident. By the time Flight 358 rocketed off the end of the runway and caught fire, nearly four years had elapsed since the last major airline accident in North America. The immediate aftermath of news reports and conflicting eyewitness accounts obscured not only the significance of 309 people surviving largely as a result of 30 years of cabin safety improvements, but it obscured the fact that tens of millions of passengers have flown unscathed since American 587 went down in New York City in 2001.
Of course we need to know what happened in Toronto, as well as in New York, and as rare as airline accidents are these days, we still need reassurance. The problem is, we're never going to get either reality or reassurance from oversimplification or premature conclusions.
Research and industry analysis long ago proved that there is never -- EVER -- a single cause to any major accident, whether aviation, rail, medical, nuclear or even corporate. Every accident, incident or near miss has a long chain of contributing causes that all came together -- we might say line up -- to reach from the beginning of a sequence to the end result.
And this reality is one of the most difficult things to convey in the first hours after an airline mishap, and Toronto is a classic example.
In the first few minutes after the Toronto accident last week, those of us in the media had only a few basic facts, including the information that an Airbus A-340 had exited the far end of the runway, broken into three pieces, been evacuated and caught fire.
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