Opinion

COME FLY WITH ME

Is it us, or are big commercial airplanes falling out of the sky with the frequency of a Nicolas Cage film?

It’s us, actually.

The flurry of plane disasters — Air France’s flight breaks up in a Hollywood-titled weather pattern called the InterTropical Convergence Zone, a Yemenia Airbus A310 plane plunges into the Indian Ocean in bad weather — remains incredibly unsettling for fliers, but isn’t really that unusual other than being a few weeks apart.

What’s changed, perhaps, is the attention they attract. Dr. Todd Curtis, who runs AirSafe.com, a site that meticulously tracks all crashes, says he’s seen his traffic quadruple in recent weeks. He notes that now that we can see images, accounts and headlines about any crash, anywhere, at any time, each accident feels closer to home.

“Public awareness of air crashes is higher now than at any time since 9/11,” Curtis says

Nervous fliers aren’t helped by the fact that we don’t know a lot about why these crashes happened. Air France on Thursday said that its previous theories about how its Airbus A330 broke up in the air in a bad thunderstorm weren’t right. Now they’re fairly sure the plane plunged from 35,000 feet intact and slammed into the Atlantic Ocean so hard as to flatten metal shelves inside the plane. The investigation continues.

It’s that mystery — not to mention the miraculous story of a sole survivor, a teen girl, in the Yemenia crash — that has made these tragedies loom larger than they normally would.

Admittedly, this has been one of the worst air disaster years worldwide in decades. But measuring air safety domestically shows we’re on a tremendous safety streak that’s not been matched in our modern aviation.

The United States has gone nearly eight years without a “mainline” aircraft disaster, meaning a large plane carrying more than 100 people flown by a major airline. The last was American Airlines’ Airbus A300 losing its rudder over Queens, a horrific incident that was somewhat overshadowed by post-9/11 angst.

Instead, we’ve enjoyed luck and heroic effort. A freak wind gust blew a Continental Airlines jet off the runway in Denver this year and the aircraft burned up, but no one died. The US Airways Airbus A320 “Miracle on the Hudson,” meanwhile, was a slot machine jackpot of good fortune. Safety experts say if Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger hadn’t picked the gently rippling Hudson River with such preternatural certitude as the best place for his bird-wounded bird, the flight crashes in Manhattan or Jersey, killing everyone on board.

Near-misses on the ground and in the air get more attention because there are more Web sites, blogs and tweets covering aviation. But Federal Aviation Administration data suggest even near-misses are decreasing, in part because airlines are flying less.

It’s us, folks. Big plane-disasters in America were pretty steady in the 1980s and 1990s. When a near-miss happens at the start of a news day in the world’s biggest media market and features a Disney-like happy ending, it gets people thinking all the time about planes and what can go wrong.

Which isn’t to say there are things that can go wrong — and that certain airlines and airplanes are more risky than others.

As with crash trends in the past, it’s the smaller jets that are more dangerous. US air safety regulators are quite worried about disasters like the Feb. 12 crash of a Colgan Air Q400 turboprop plane in Buffalo that killed 50. That incident, and a 2006 Lexington, Ky. crash of another small jet, have put the spotlight on the regional jet operators that fly passengers for larger carriers; the Colgan Air flight was actually sold as a Continental Airlines route, but flown by Colgan pilots.

Regional jet operators hire younger pilots and those crews must fly smaller planes that are more susceptible to weather. Those pilots must fly six or seven or eight times a day to get their hours, because pilots are paid only when the planes are moving.

AirSafe’s Curtis believes the problems surrounding these regional airlines will be sorted out, both through increased regulation and from the flying public, who will avoid tarnished companies.

Meanwhile, flying famously remains the safest way to travel. Your odds of dying when flying on one of the 25 “safest” airlines — the ones you’re most likely to use — are 1 in 8.47 million. If you’re on one the 25 “least safe” airlines, your odds increase to 1 in 830,000. Sounds bad, until you compare that to your chances of dying in a motor vehicle accident — 1 in 6,500.

But nothing is totally safe. While the recent spate of crash headlines are an anomaly, they aren’t completely avoidable. It may be cold comfort to jittery fliers, but, as Curtis says, “It’s a bit of good training, better equipment and dumb luck that we haven’t had more.”

Eric Torbenson is an aviation writer based in Dallas.