Your next airline flight: worth the risk?

Risk Management, April, 1995 by Vernon L. Grose

The spate of fatal airline accidents has intensified public awareness, sensitivity and even concern about the risks of flying.

Last September, when USair Flight 427 suddenly rolled to the left at 6,000 feet and plunged full-speed to the earth outside Pittsburgh, the 132 souls aboard had no time to assess airline risk. Next, American Eagle Flight 4184 - just as abruptly - inverted, disintegrated in midair and scattered itself over 40 acres of rural Indiana. The risk for the 68 people onboard that flight was infinite. Six weeks later, American Eagle Flight 3379 crashed in North Carolina ending the lives of 15 more people who had accepted the risk of a scheduled commercial flight.

This spate of fatal airline accidents revived public awareness, sensitivity and even concern about the risks of flying. Risk is managed, of course, at many levels of society. But ultimately, each person manages risk at the personal level. So, everyone is their own risk manager. This very private assessment of risk is likely responsible for the intense interest - even fascination - in news media coverage of an airliner crash. One way that risk managers can gain credibility and support within their realm of professional influence is to be able to discuss risk rationally at the personal level where everyone can identify with it.

What produces such widespread entrancement with the risk of a commercial airline flight, especially after a crash? Why is this concern so lopsided when compared with the risks of skiing, driving an automobile, smoking or hunting - all of which involve 1,000 times more risk than flying?

After an accident, the airlines, air travel advocates and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) are likely to focus on impersonal issues like aircraft design and maintenance, cockpit resource management, air traffic control or weather forecasting. But public interest could be more subtle. At least 10 subconscious passenger factors may better explain why the public becomes alarmed when scheduled airlines have one of their extremely rare accidents. These factors, summarized in Figure 1, are not openly acknowledged or discussed and may even be denied by public spokespersons. Yet they are there. Professional managers of risk must not overlook or exclude them from evaluation.

Role of the Subconscious

First and very importantly, flying is not something humans naturally do. As recently as 1930, only an infinitesimal number of people had ever flown commercially. At that time, flight was regarded either as a novelty, a luxury or an act of audacity. Why? Because people in an airplane had broken contact with the earth and put themselves at unknown risk.

What has happened since then? We have overcome much of the risk technologically and masked (maybe accommodated or accepted) the rest. But an airline flight still involves many risks not experienced on the ground. Whatever airlines do to make passengers feel as though they are in their living rooms at home - by providing slippers, drinks, food, music, magazines, pillows, reclining seats and movies - only disguises these risks. Indeed, these risks are collectively quite low, but still exist.

That every traveler places his or her life unreservedly in the hands of someone else upon boarding an airliner is undeniable. Most people enjoy charting their own destiny - controlling as many variables and determinants as possible. That control is set aside upon boarding a flight. Once on the aircraft, passengers implicitly accept such risks as inadequate design or improper maintenance of the aircraft, piloting incompetence, misunderstood communications, undetected airborne weather and ineffective air traffic control - hoping that government regulators have reduced them to an acceptable level in our behalf.

Some airline risk factors are overt while others are covert. The charm of being rapidly carried from one point to another illustrates the latter. It can override good sense in some cases. Pro football commentator John Madden still resists the seduction of flying - traveling only by bus. But most people subconsciously decide the advantage of rapid transport outweighs the risk of a crash. Interestingly, this risk consideration became overt for many travelers following the two American Eagle accidents last fall - when the only airborne choice meant flying an ATR-72 commuter aircraft in northern winter weather.

Studies have shown that, for most people, acceptability of risk is inversely related to the number of people who participate in that risk. Though everyone readily accepts traveling by air today as virtually risk-free, that assumption is another covert risk factor. Entire populations have been swept by persuasive argument into high risk situations. Occasionally, there remains the need for airline travelers to ask, "Could we be making a mistake?" Evidence available for airline passengers to question or resist public acceptance of risk will always be scant, of course. That is why government regulators are appointed to be the public's advocates.