Airlines spend serious money to convince consumers flying is safe. Not only is flying safe, they insist, but it is waymore safe than driving.
The Miracle on the Hudson improved airline mortality statistics, because no one died. (78 were injured)
Why is it, then — every time some folks board planes, settle into the seat, place the tray-table up and the seat-back in the upright position, hear the engines ignite and roar, and feel the pull of the plane against their backs — hands begin to sweat, the heart pounds, guts squirm, and minds start screaming helpless, desperate questions: What if they’re wrong? What if I die? Why didn’t I take the car?
If anyone is like me, they enter a car to go somewhere five or six times a day. In other words, people participate in driving events thousands of times a year. Is it really possible that boarding a plane thousands of times a year is safer than driving? Many humans would die from heart attacks alone, if they did such a thing.
Even if anyone has two or three car accidents per year, it is unlikely that someone will die. In fact, stats reveal that one auto-related death occurs per 100 million driving miles. It amounts to 3.4 million hours of driving.
It’s equivalent to one driver navigating their vehicle 390 years continuously — 24/7 — without a break. Does anyone believe an airplane of any kind at all can fly that many years accident-free? When it crashes, hundreds of passengers die. It’s not so hard to figure out.
When airplanes, helicopters, and jets crash, it is unlikely anyone will survive. An aircraft must fly perfectly or people die, more times than not.
Not so with cars.
This accident in San Francisco had little effect on mortality statistics for the Boeing 777, because only three people died. (181 were injured)
It’s probably un-helpful to spout a bunch of numbers and ratios and statistics to prove the obvious. People in panic-mode don’t do well with numbers, anyway.
But let me make this observation: smart people in the airline industry are serving up a mess of misleading statistics to get the flying public to underestimate the risks of boarding an airplane.
Guess what? Airlines perform this charade to separate the traveling public from its money. Is anyone surprised?
The only way flying will ever be safer than driving is if folks fly as few times a year as possible. All the favorable statistics airlines like to quote rest on this simple premise: If people fly less, they are less likely to die.
People get into planes fewer times than into cars. Therefore flying is safer than driving. Cogito ergo sum. Quoderat demonstrandum.
Arrow points to intact flight-cabin during Challenger disaster.
Remembering the Space Shuttle program may bring the point into sharper focus. As the public knows now, the government discontinued the space-shuttle after observers pointed out that it was unreasonably dangerous to the astronauts.
At first the program seemed safe. Then an accident took a dozen lives. Afterward, it was safe again. Then another accident. More deaths.
Soon it became obvious. Every thirty flights the program was going to lose an entire crew. A way to improve the odds couldn’t be found. The program was scrapped.
The government threw up its hands and said: Let private companies handle the space program. Look at the great job they are doing for the airlines.
Here is an excerpt from a 1975 resume about my experience in the nuclear power industry:
Engineering Technician at Ingersoll-Rand Company. Designed and serviced pumps and condensers for nuclear power plants; assisted engineers on service calls; toured and worked inside nuclear power plants; trained in construction and operation of nuclear power plants.
I didn’t last long at Ingersoll-Rand before they fired me for incompetence. But during the six months before my meltdown they sent me inside nuclear power plants to learn how to operate and maintain the pumps and condensers used to move and cool liquids inside the plants. Under the supervision of licensed nuclear engineers I learned how to inspect and fix pumps — some of them the size of little houses.
The plant executives had the habit of inviting visiting engineers and technicians to lunch, where their supervisors would present short overviews of plant operation, describe safety features, and speculate about the future of nuclear energy in the United States.
They promised that the government planned to approve the construction of a thousand nuclear power plants by the year 2000. The facilities would be “fail-safe” due to their many redundant safety features. As it turned out, their enthusiasm was misguided.
As of today, 438 nuclear power plants have been built in the entire world. The United States operates 61. The safety record is abysmal.
The Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant in Pennsylvania suffered a partial meltdown in March 1979 — twelve days after Michael Douglas released the movie China Syndrome. The meltdown catapulted the movie to international success as people struggled to understand what happened. After the accident, cancer rates within ten miles of the plant increased 64% according to a team of Columbia University researchers.
Currently, there are 30 operating nuclear reactors at 12 generating stations on 11 sites in the Great Lakes basin. Almost all are located on the banks of our great fresh-water lakes. Radioactive waste-products are stored in cooling-ponds at each of these sites yards away from the purest fresh-water on planet Earth.
Highly radioactive, spent-fuel rods are collected and dry-stored at Chicago’s Lake Michigan Zion facility, which experts warned in 2015 pose risks not only to the Great Lakes but to the entire region. The lethal dry-storage facility and the contaminated ponds at power-plants located on the shores of the Great Lakes grow in size and radioactivity year after year after year.
Editors note: On 25 October 2016, Energy Solutions announced that the Zion plant is 88% shut down and that all of its high radiation fuel rods are now contained inside an on-site ISFSI (Independent Spent Fuel Storage Installation) where they will remain until someone figures out what to do with them. The entire facility is scheduled for closure by January 1, 2027 at a cost of 1 billion dollars.
We are one earthquake away from catastrophic contamination of up to ten percent of the world’s freshwater supply.
31 people died at the Russian Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in April 1986. Today the number of deaths stands at nearly 100,000. The plant released 400 times the radioactive material of the bomb dropped by the USA on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Authorities evacuated the city; it remains uninhabited. Click this link for a drone-video of the site.Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant in Japan experienced catastrophic failure during the March 3, 2011 tsunami, which swept away nearly 20,000 people. The accident irradiated over 300 workers and killed six. The site will never recover.
Editor’s Note added 3-11-2021: The Japanese government announced this week that 3,775 people died during the past decade from health problems caused by what officials now admit was a “triple meltdown” at Fukushima. 41,000 remain forced to live outside their hometowns.
Several districts near the plant continue to be off-limits to everyone. The government hopes to decommission the power plant by 2051.
The ruined facility houses 900 tons of highly radioactive debris and 1.2 million tons of radioactive water that must be removed and isolated before the plant can be safely closed. The coronavirus pandemic slowed progress at the site, according to NHK News.
Anyway, after the lectures — which were accompanied by short films and slide presentations — executives opened the sessions for questions from the audience. I was one of those nerds who believed they were serious so I did ask a lot of questions. (I was a pontificator even then).
I asked: What is the half-life of the radioactive waste produced in this plant? Where is waste stored? How much of it will this plant produce over the next 30 years? What happens during an earthquake? How are meltdowns prevented? What are the consequences of operator errors? What happens when the plant gets old and comes to the end of its useful life?
It wasn’t long before my supervisor called me into his office and advised me to keep my questions to myself and do my job better. But it was not to be. I learned a life lesson: when the boss tells you to be quiet and just do your job — hold on to your hat. It’s too late. You will be fired as soon as the permissions and the paperwork are done.
Maybe I was incompetent. I don’t know. After being fired I went into counseling for depression. I re-entered MSU and studied mathematics and electrical engineering. I ended up designing machinery — mostly in the food and beverage industry — until I retired six years ago in 2008.
Everyone uses tear-spout coffee lids on foam coffee cups. Folks drink their coffee without removing the lid. Yeah, I designed the first one and the tooling to produce it; it was a team effort, of course. Everyone buys orange juice and milk cartons with tamper-proof safety caps. Yeah. I did those too. I share a patent, which proves it.
What am I most proud of? I didn’t design a damn thing on that Fukushima disaster, which is contaminating the Pacific Ocean and its fish stocks, perhaps to the end of time.
Billy Lee
NOTE from the EDITORIAL BOARD:In May 2019, HBO released its award nominated series on the Chernobyl disaster of April 25, 1986. The producers speculate that up to 93,000 Russian citizens died in the aftermath from radiation poisoning. The video below is a promo of the series.
When I was 4 years old, our family lived in Japan.
I have a vivid memory of a dark night when the maid took my brother and me out for a rendezvous with our parents. We stood on concrete steps outside a brick building waiting for them to show up.
The neon sign emitted a bright glow of colors. I’d never seen anything like it.
Beneath the starless sky, almost at eye level, a neon sign emitted a glow of colors. I’d never seen anything like it. I asked our Japanese maid what it was. It’s television, she said.
The year was 1952. Four years earlier, the first television stations in the United States started to broadcast. But Japan then was a primitive, conquered country. It would be years before television arrived. Our maid didn’t know what she was looking at. Neither did I. For me televisions continued to be bright neon signs for quite some time.
True regular commercial television network programming did not begin in the U.S. until 1948. During that year legendary conductor Arturo Toscanini made his first of ten TV appearances conducting the NBC Symphony Orchestra;Texaco Star Theater, starring comedian Milton Berle, became television’s first hit show. Since the 1950s, television has been the main medium for molding public opinion.
[Not to digress into weeds that might choke a winding river, but during World War II, Italian composer Arturo Toscanini’s daughter Wally Castelbarco (friend to Russian-born actress Marianned Pistohlkors) and Allen Dulles (CIA director, 1953-1961) engaged in a ”forbidden” sexual affair in Bern, Switzerland (check the correct location and dates). President Kennedy fired Dulles after the failed 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. Following Kennedy’s murder in 1963, Allen Dulles sat on the Warren Commission. He died from complications of flu in 1969. Wally is the woman at the far left standing next to her parents.]
Like almost everyone else in America, our family missed the first seven years of broadcast television, including Toscanini’s series. I was born in San Diego in 1948, the year commercial television made its debut. At the time, Americans owned 45,000 television sets — three-quarters of them in the New York City area. (Americans owned 44 million radios.) In San Diego, what few televisions there were lay locked, most of them, behind laboratory doors.
Mom and Dad didn’t buy our first television until 1955. I was seven. By then we were living in Bethesda, Maryland where Dad worked for the National Security Agency. At the time, no one knew the NSA existed. It was television, many years later, that brought the secret agency to the public’s attention.
Touching the television could get you sent to your room, or worse.
Our first television looked a lot like the one pictured above. It was a magical box that, at first, we were not allowed to touch. Touching the television got us sent to our rooms, or worse. Dad delivered a painful nip with his finger to the back of any hand that dared to touch the keen knobs that controlled the TV’s mysterious features. But eventually, especially when Dad wasn’t around, the rest of the family, myself included, became adept at the controls.
The television-set broadcast two channels crisp and clear and one channel with a lot of “snow.” The picture was always black and white, and the stations went dead after 11:30 PM. Of course, we were all in bed well before then. Our parents wouldn’t dream of staying up later. They worked, after all.
After 11:30 PM each television station would display a graphic like the ones below and issue forth a loud hum or ringing noise. Sometimes I got up way too early and would observe these mysterious symbols and their humming on all three channels. They reminded me of what we might see and hear if Russia attacked us with atomic rockets.
After hours, mysterious symbols hummed on all three channels.
Our favorite shows were on early Saturday morning. In addition to cartoons like Mighty Mouse, we watched The Lone Ranger, the Howdy Doody Show, Buffalo Bill, and Captain Kangaroo.
On weekdays after school, we rushed home to watch the Mickey Mouse Club starring Annette Funicello. I loved Annette completely. She was the only female Mouseketeer to have boobs.
Annette Funicello
Next to Marilyn Monroe — who everybody knew about but no one had ever seen (she wasn’t allowed on television) — Annette Funicello was the most desirable female on planet Earth at that time. But, by fourth grade, a terrible tragedy struck. Though not reported by television or newspapers (kids didn’t read newspapers, anyway), every child somehow learned that Annette had died from bubblegum asphyxiation — a tragedy to rival the Kennedy assassination years later.
Much later — in college during the 1960s — we learned Annette Funicello didn’t die. Media reported that she was alive and well and living somewhere in California.
The knowledge helped to ameliorate the pain of other deaths that were reported in the newspapers and on television back then — John and Bobby Kennedy; Martin Luther King; Malcolm X; Otis Redding; Jimi Hendrix; Janis Joplin; Marilyn Monroe; Che Guevara — and many others. Maybe it was possible, just possible — we hoped against hope — someday, someway — we would learn that these unusual people didn’t die, either.
By my third-grade year, the biggest event in everyone’s lives was the night Elvis Presley appeared on television for the first time — on the Ed Sullivan Show. Everyone — adults and kids alike — dropped everything to see Elvis. Words cannot express how huge this event was in the history of America. Those who didn’t have a television went out and found one. The entire country watched.
Everyone knew about the controversial movements Elvis Presley made with his legs and hips — they were reported in all the magazines and newspapers — but no one could imagine what these moves actuallylooked like. We needed television to show us.
Elvis Presley, 1956
And what did television do? In a spectacle that would be repeated again and again for decades after, television dropped the ball and disappointed its huge viewing audience. The camera focused on Presley’s face and upper body. No one saw his infamous lower-body machinations. After all the psychic energy invested by everyone to finally learn the secrets of this unusual man’s success, television left us wondering.
Elvis sang a song that night we had all heard many times before on the radio: Hound Dog. Seeing the song performed — not just hearing it, like on the radio — was exciting enough to make most everyone forget about what they had missed.
You ain’t nothing but a hound dog — cryin’ all the time. You ain’t nothing but a hound dog — cryin’ all the time. You ain’t never caught a rabbit, and you ain’t no friend of mine. When they said you was high class, well that was just a lie. When they said you was high class, well that was just a lie. You ain’t never caught a rabbit, and you ain’t no friend of mine.
No one who experienced the magic of his television appearance could imagine in their darkest nightmare that someday Elvis would die, too.
On a brighter note: advertising revenue for the show set an all-time record; viewership set an all-time high. It seemed clear to all that television was here to stay.
