Fear, Risk, and Airplanes
We are at home with the familiar. Even when the familiar is risky. We are more aware of risk with the exotic, even when the exotic is relatively safe.
There are some things I think I’ve figured out. First, nothing is completely safe. Second, if I try to live my life in perfectly safely then I’ll have a very poor life. Third, the actual risk is probably controllable to some extent. And last, the actual risk is probably not what the popular view holds it to be.
Bruce Scheier, in writing about the Virginia Tech shootings, says, “Our brains aren’t very good at probability and risk analysis, especially when it comes to rare occurrences. We tend to exaggerate spectacular, strange and rare events, and downplay ordinary, familiar and common ones.” Our perception of risk is distorted by familiarity.
I have friends that don’t like to fly. One has a reason: he flew helicopters in Viet Nam and was shot down. He’s got a conditioned reflex there that I can understand. Another prefers driving. Statistically that’s less safe, but she feels in control even if she isn’t really.
My strategy is to deal with this by education. In short, find out more information and look at it dispassionately. Sometime before I actually learned to fly, I read all the NTSB reports for two years for one area of the U.S. and came to a several conclusions. First, unavoidable situations and catastrophic mid-air accidents are quite rare. Second, around 2/3s of the accidents I read had two things in common: flight into weather the pilot or plane was not equipped for, or running out of gas. There’s also a category of just stupid pilot tricks like exceeding speeds that an airplane is capable of, or getting too slow and stalling at low altitude.
Those are controllable. If I eliminated those dumb moves, checked my fuel tanks, and was careful with weather I was actually safer than driving. After all, in driving I’m moving fast perhaps only 8 feet away from someone who’s reading a newspaper or talking on their cellphone and gesturing with both hands. (Yes I’ve seen both, a number of times.) So in learning to fly and since I’ve made it a habit to always check fuel, to only trust the fuel gauges when I’ve verified the tanks. I’ve also made weather a strong interest.
Accidents of all sorts, not just in aviation, have a characteristic that usually several things have to go wrong. Accidents are a chain of events that all have to happen correctly (or incorrectly) to cause the problem. If the chain is broken, there might be a “close call”, but no accident. Another analogy I like is the “swiss cheese” model. The holes in the layer of swiss cheese have to line up just right to let an accident through.
The aviation system is built with margins and backups to make that chain longer and keep at least one link from breaking. But, accidents still do happen. It is a fact of life that humans make mistakes. It is a personal effort to improve and avoid mistakes, not something that can be legislated. There are people who fly all their lives and have never had an accident. I strive to be one of those. More that than, I am planning and training and making that personal effort to be one of those.
But on a level of our whole society. if we are to accept a technology into our lives, we must accept that there will be, unfortunately, an accident. No matter how safe we try to be. If we use gasoline, fires will happen. If we have guns, shootings will happen, if we have cars, car accidents will happen, and so on. If we accept a technology, we accept its consequences wether we know we’re doing that or not.
That is not to say that we should just accept our fates and have accidents, but we should accept that we will never get rid of all accidents. We should strive for safety and work for it. But the modern tendency to want to be perfect safe is not only unrealistic but probably undesirable.
Risk, a calculated and careful kind of risk, is the only way to move forward. If we never risk, we never try anything new. We can only learn new ideas and facts by trying new things.
May 14th, 2009 at 15:20
I firmly believe that the antidote to Risk is Judgment. To obtain good judgment you either need training or experience. Unfortunately in flying, obtaining the experience before the judgment can easily kill. I’m using all of my senses to counter my own fear. I read, I blog, I stay keen on all sorts of periphery and doing so has kept me alive so far. I also have certain rules to catch me if my judgment fails. 3 strikes no flight. “It’s better to be on the ground wishing you were in the air…….”
The downside is that the more I eliminate risk, the less fun I seem to have!
I believe if I were in your situation owning my own aircraft, I might operate differently as after a time, things would lull me into familiar complacency.
May 16th, 2009 at 13:34
Viennatech, sounds like you’re doing it right! Thanks for your comments, it’s very useful to accumulate ways of managing risk
I think of risk as “probability of something bad happening”. The “something bad” can be much less drastic than an accident involving bent metal or broken fiberglass. It can be as minor as “I set my rule as +- 50 feet for this trip, and I’m off 100!”.
In other words, I’m setting my tolerance for sloppiness very tight lately. This way, I have a wider safety margin. And I teach myself to fly to stricter standards.
Also, I consider some part of risk as calculated risk: that is I have an out or backdoor away if I need it, or a recovery plan. So yes, I’ve done fun things like a falling leaf stall safely! That’s pretty fun.