Darrell Campbell
Appearances
Today, Explained
Is flying still safe?
I know it's been a little bit terrifying, to be honest, especially over the last 12 weeks. I think this has been the most crashes that we've seen since, I think, before the pandemic. And so when you see that, it's obviously really newsworthy, and it's something that strikes a lot of fear into people's hearts. So the good news is the airplanes right now are fine.
Today, Explained
Is flying still safe?
Commercial aviation remains one of the safest modes of transportation. But it does show that in order to be safe, we need to have every single part of this very complex system working in sync. And I think there's signs that some of it is starting to show a little bit of stress.
Today, Explained
Is flying still safe?
Yeah, and I wouldn't blame anybody for, you know, pulling up the Amtrak website the next time that they decide that they need to take a trip. I mean, if you think about it, we've had two major crashes of a commercial airplane in North America.
Today, Explained
Is flying still safe?
We've had two in Asia, and then you've got this sort of ambient background of there's the air ambulance crash in Philadelphia.
Today, Explained
Is flying still safe?
And there's the planes that collided on the runway in Scottsdale. We've learned a jet veered off the runway after landing and crashed into a business jet. Another pair that collided in midair near Tempe.
Today, Explained
Is flying still safe?
In fact, just before this, there was a Southwest Airlines airplane that's basically involved in what's called a runway incursion, where they were trying to land and another airplane was crossing in front of them.
Today, Explained
Is flying still safe?
People are primed to look at this sort of thing right now. And especially because over the last couple of years, ironically, in a bid to improve safety, every single airport has a lot of recording devices, video cameras. And so we can get video of a lot of these things happening. So it makes it a little bit more vivid.
Today, Explained
Is flying still safe?
But statistically speaking, it's safer now to fly than it has been at any point since the 1960s. And even if you take the last couple of years, it's safer now to fly than it was even before the pandemic.
Today, Explained
Is flying still safe?
And so even though it feels like certain things are breaking down, other things are also going right to make sure that even if in the worst case scenario, people are still able to exit the airplane without any injury or anything like that.
Today, Explained
Is flying still safe?
So your chance of getting into a fatal car crash at some point in your life is a little bit less than one in 100. So it's like one in 95 or so. It's about a 1% chance. But the thing about that is people are in control when they get in the driver's seat. They feel like they're the best driver on the road, that they can sort of maneuver their way around an accident, that they can deal with whatever.
Today, Explained
Is flying still safe?
Whereas when you're in the back of an airplane, you're not in charge. You're in the middle of this complex system that maybe you understand, maybe you don't. And, you know, you've seen Lost. My husband keeps reminding me that planes want to be in the air. You've seen Flight with Denzel Washington.
Today, Explained
Is flying still safe?
You've seen all of these horrible things that make you fear the worst whenever you feel the slightest bump. We are inverted. I repeat, we are inverted, Sergeant. So that's kind of the psychological background. But statistically speaking, you could fly twice a day for about 2,500 years before you even run the risk of getting into a fatal aviation accident.
Today, Explained
Is flying still safe?
So that is, I think it's like 10,000 orders of magnitude safer than just getting in your car every day. But that's not how the human mind works. The human mind fixates on the stuff that you dread and the stuff that you feel like you have no control over. So it's totally understandable, and I totally get it.
Today, Explained
Is flying still safe?
Yes, but not for the reasons that people think. So the one of the things to understand about aviation is like in the 1950s and the 1960s, airplanes would crash for reasons that now seem like boneheaded things like they didn't really understand how to make them properly or people didn't know how to, you know, tell the pilot that he's screwing up or anything like that.
Today, Explained
Is flying still safe?
And so we've actually ironed out most of the big issues. obvious hazards in aviation. So paradoxically, when something happens now, it's because a lot of individual things happened, each of which reduced the margin of safety just by a little bit, but then enough of them added up so that it actually caused a disaster.
Today, Explained
Is flying still safe?
In the context of the American Airlines mid-air collision outside of D.C., we had a last-minute runway change. We had a pilot on the helicopter who was on what's called a checkride, so she was essentially getting tested on her abilities. We had a simultaneous radio transmission where the helicopter pilots didn't hear an important piece of information from air traffic control.
Today, Explained
Is flying still safe?
And then we know that they were looking at what was probably a different airplane than the one they were tracking. So again, each one of those things wouldn't have caused an accident by itself, but all of them happened simultaneously. And then also against the background of air traffic control being understaffed and really overworked, especially at Reagan Airport.
Today, Explained
Is flying still safe?
It just made all of these things line up in such a way that sort of catastrophe followed.
Today, Explained
Is flying still safe?
There's, I think, a couple of things that the aviation system already does that address that. So a lot of it is like, if you remember the movie Sully with Tom Hanks.
Today, Explained
Is flying still safe?
And the whole frame of the movie is that they're in that hearing and they're just asking a lot of these really specific questions.
Today, Explained
Is flying still safe?
Well, that actually happens every time that there's an incident. And so we'll get to the bottom of this in probably between sort of six months to a year's time. But there's really not a ton of quick fixes. And I think the...
Today, Explained
Is flying still safe?
Probably the most tragic thing in the American Airlines accident above Reagan is that all of those problems that we talked about, understaffing at the air traffic control center, last-minute deviations in sort of a flight path at the last minute in one of the most congested airports in the entire country, the fact that there's a military base just a couple miles where helicopters are taking off and landing, all of these things are big systemic problems.
Today, Explained
Is flying still safe?
And as anybody who's worked in a big organization knows, there's just a lot of inertia that you have to get over in order to fix these things. So it is going to take a lot of effort.
Today, Explained
Is flying still safe?
There's really only one way to ensure that there are no plane crashes anywhere in the world, and that's just to ground every single airplane. As long as you have people flying airplanes, there will be problems that can put people's lives in danger. You should worry about airplanes when they start to crash for the same reason.
Today, Explained
Is flying still safe?
You think about the two, for example, Boeing 737 MAXs that crashed in 2018 and 2019. They crashed for the same reason that Boeing had put in this faulty piece of software that could essentially overpower pilots and rip controls away from them and cause a crash. And then they tried to cover it up right afterwards, and that's the sort of thing that you really need to worry about.
Today, Explained
Is flying still safe?
I think the best consolation is that we've gotten to the point where the risk of a fatal plane crash is less than one in two million. So I'm comfortable accepting that. The safest thing for you to do is just sit in your room and not do anything all day. I think all of us want to go places, do things, and sometimes you just have to accept a little bit of risk.
Today, Explained
Is flying still safe?
Fortunately, air travel is one of the least risky things that you can do.