Why fear of flying is immune to statistics

AIR travel's unknown ability is what makes it different from, say, car travel. It is unhelpful that air industry magi most often compare the safety of air travel with the dangerousness of car travel one's chances of dying in a car or taxi are 37 times higher, per mile, than one's chances of dying in an aircraft.

Most of us feel that car travel is an area that is still knowable. The neighbour tinkers with car engines we plan our own routes we drive our own vehicles. Car travel is both knowable and controllable, and no amount of official data will alter our opinion about this.

But the jet plane is entirely unknowable, and our superstition pays unwilling homage to the unknowable mystery. The early aviator was also an engineer. The engine was cranked up like a car's.

Roughly until the advent of the jet, and especially the jumbo jet with its supra normal and incomprehensible complexities, the aircraft was a knowable mystery.

This at least we can surmise from the literature and film of the first 50 years of this century. In novels such as H.G. Wells's TonoBungay and Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway and Between The Acts in some of Auden's poetry, the aircraft is vaguely erotic, an agent of change, sometimes menacing (its menace increased, of course, as the second World War increased).

But the aeroplane was knowable. It was part of the knowable world part of the ground, indeed.

Because early aeroplanes stayed so close to the ground, there was an essential connection between the ground and the air. All these three writers used the plane to imagine seeing England from the air. The air was not important to them the air was the medium in which you newly conquered the ground.

It was in this spirit that pioneer aviators such as Amelia Earhart set out to conquer air travel. The tradition which they were following was the tradition of land exploration, and their trips were still conquerings of land distance via the air circumnavigations of place that happened to occur in the air.

But modern jet travel changes everything. The jet flies miles away from Earth, and now lives in its own empyrean. The jumbo jet in particular has become one of the very emblems of technological unfathomability. And jet travel is part of a vast network, equally unknowable, of worldwide travel, coordinated by "controllers" in darkened rooms.

Contemporary air travel has the lineaments of a spy narrative, in which paranoid victims are controlled by unseen forces. Terrorism, of course, is another unseen force which meshes easily with the very model of air travel.

Or put it another way the early aviators were colonists we who take planes nowadays are savages because the unknoability of technology forces us into essentially superstitious postures.

ON THE one hand, we do not trust what we are told. After the recent ValuJet crash in the US, the Secretary of Transportation, Mr Federico Pena, tried to reassure Americans that there was no connection between low cost (cheap air tickets) and low safety and that air travel was safer than it had ever been.

Both assertions are demonstrably true. Over the past 15 years, 93 people on average died every year in US commercial airline crashes. By coincidence, this is the same number killed each year by lightning.

But most of us are not soothed by such statistics, and Americans were so alarmed by the nature of the ValuJet crash that pressure was brought on the Federal Aviation Administration to ground the company's elderly fleet.

Statistically, we are safe. Yet such statistics are based on the vast amount of trouble free air travel that occurs every day (there are something like 21,000 flights every day in the US alone). And, for those who are likely to be frightened, the vast amount of air travel is precisely what is frightening.

We are frightened by the idea of aircraft that never stop working the doomed TWA jet, for instance, had arrived from Athens just three hours before it took off from New York. And we feel, entirely nonsensically, that it is the vast amount of air travel that, in some way, "uses up" the safe statistics.

This is why those who are afraid of air travel often suggest that if there has been a long period in which there have been no major accidents, then it is about time for another accident the slack has been consumed, used up, by the period of safety.

Similarly, people speak, after major accidents, of the air having been cleared the implication being that propitiation has been made to the gods, and that we are now "owed" a period of safety.

A colleague of mine took a ValuJet shuttle from Washington to Boston three days after the Florida crash on the statistical principle that this was just the safest time to use ValuJet. But if ValuJet was unsafe as the FAA decided a few weeks later then there was no "good" time to take a ValuJet plane.

In some curious way, we believe that the safety of air travel is just a kind of waiting game for each new accident. We feel that the gods are easily provoked, and that they are especially provoked if we poor earthlings have a good run of it.

None of this is rational. In the theologian Tertullian accused of "making a suit of belief to fit their own design".

For just as we choose not to believe the language of technology and statistics, we cover ourselves with selected rags from this very same discourse. Essentially mistrustful of what we are told say, about air traffic control we cleave pathetically to whatever we find consoling.

So we are sagacious about certain airlines having young or old fleets, or how air turbulence is not a problem, or how 32,000 feet is actually the safest place for a plane to be, and so on.

But if we believe what we are told about these things by experts, then we should accept the larger picture, and not be afraid of air travel and if we are afraid of air travel, then we should not believe any part of the technological discourse.

Nowadays, we don't actually get anywhere near the jet plane we are simply piped into its belly, and vomited out, Jonah like, at the other end. To arrive on the tarmac, from steps, happens only to presidents, or on very small aircraft. The aircraft's absolute control over us is emblemised in the verb "de plane", to signify leaving the structure at the end of a journey.

We could not say "de-car" it would sound portentous when applied to an activity which is so simple and so much our own. But "de-plane" captures exactly the nature of contemporary air travel. It is not that we actively leave the plane, it is, rather, that the aircraft gets rid of us we are deplaned, rather as we are demoted or deposed.