Why do we accept so many airline crash deaths?

It’s no exaggeration to say that our country – and indeed the world – faces an epidemic of commercial airline crash deaths. As everybody knows by now, something is leading to between two and five crashes every day in the US, causing around 800 to 850 deaths a day.

The problem first appeared in China in early January, and of course we were all inclined to write it off at the time as something that happens regularly there. We had our first crash in early February, but when it happened we all bemoaned the fact that the ten-year string of years with no crashes at all had been broken. It never even occurred to us that these would start to occur with great regularity. Even when we had a second crash in early March, we still didn’t see a trend, and our president assured us this problem would disappear very quickly.

By the third crash on March 25, which killed 247 people, we began to realize something was very wrong. And sure enough, there was a crash every day between March 25 and March 30. Of course, we all swore that this trend wouldn’t continue, and it didn’t – on March 30 there were two crashes causing 686 deaths, and the daily total hasn’t fallen below two since then. In fact, the daily crash total continued to increase and peaked on April 21, when there were nine crashes and 2,825 deaths in one day.

Of course, in China there was a crash a day by late January, and the daily crashes continued into early February. However, these led China to take drastic steps to address the problem, with the result that there have been no crashes there in more than a month (although some people have died as a result of earlier crashes, and there is concern there might soon be new crashes because of the increased number of flights).

Indeed, China has had “only” 30 crashes this year – for a total of 4,634 deaths – whereas as of June 13 the US has had 585 crashes, for a total of 117,528 deaths. Other countries have done even better than China, since they quickly drew the lessons to be learned from China’s experience in January.  Vietnam has had no crashes and no deaths. New Zealand lost one small plane with 22 deaths. South Korea has had one crash with 277 deaths.

Of course, we’re not the only country with a bad record for deaths in plane crashes. Brazil, Russia and the UK all have recorded crash deaths per capita of a similar order of magnitude to ours. The UK's ratio is almost twice ours. They tried an early strategy of just letting the crashes happen, on the idea that, after enough crashes, airlines would fix whatever problems were causing them. That strategy didn't work too well, and now they're being much more aggressive.

As we all know, in late March most states put in place a ban on all “non-essential” air travel (although there was no nationwide ban). Since this reduced the number of flights by about two thirds, it also reduced the number of deaths by that amount. At the moment we seem to be in a steady state of 2-4 crashes per day with roughly 800-850 deaths a day, although recent increases in permitted air travel in most states have led many experts to believe that these numbers will start going up again soon.

But the really disturbing trend is that there seems to be growing agreement that this level of crashes and deaths is acceptable because of the need to get the economy growing again. Indeed, the severe cutbacks in air travel devastated the economy, since so much of it was very dependent on quick transfer of goods and people. When we were losing over 2,000 people every day, very few people argued that we shouldn’t ban as much air travel as possible. But some line seems to have been crossed since then, at which the cost in dollars lost due to the ban is considered to outweigh the cost in lives lost.

What is most disturbing is that the supposed trade-off between the economy and air crash deaths isn’t real. As many economists and finance types have pointed out, we’ll never fix the economy until we fix the problem of air crashes. We might have somewhat larger economic growth now, due to the fact that we are allowing more flights. But even if the number of crashes doesn’t start growing again – which is unlikely, of course – a large proportion of the population won’t feel comfortable flying again until we have at least a few years with no crashes at all; obviously, we’re a long way from that point.

Of course, scientists and engineers at the FAA and elsewhere are frantically searching for a real fix to this problem, and there’s some realistic hope that we may be down to zero crashes in a year or so. But many people argue that it’s far from certain that the problem will ever be totally solved. They say we need to get deaths down to zero now, not at some unknown point in the future. Yet this argument doesn’t seem to carry any weight with a lot of Americans – and certainly with a lot of politicians. This means we may be stuck with 800 plane crash deaths a day for a minimum of a year, and perhaps forever. In that case, the economy will never recover, and the US will likely become isolated from the rest of the world - since nobody will want to travel to the US or allow Americans to travel to their countries without taking extraordinary precautions.

Of course, the irony of this whole situation is that, if the deaths were being caused by a problem like a global flu pandemic, there would be no discussion at all of whether any level of deaths was acceptable or not. Why do we make an exception when the cause is airline crashes?

The numbers

Since projected deaths have changed very little since yesterday’s post, I’m not including that table today. But the actual numbers reported below are updated.

I. Total deaths

Total US deaths as of yesterday: 117,528

Increase in deaths since previous day: 681 (vs. 795 yesterday)

Percent increase in deaths since previous day: 1% (this number was 1% yesterday)

Yesterday’s 7-day rate of increase in total deaths: 5% (This number is used to project deaths in the table above – it was 5% yesterday. There is a 7-day cycle in deaths, caused by lack of reporting over the weekends from closed state offices. So this is the only reliable indicator of a trend in deaths, not the three-day percent increase I used to focus on, and certainly not the one-day percent increase, which mainly reflects where we are in the 7-day cycle).

II. Total reported cases

Total US reported cases: 2,142,345

Increase in reported cases since previous day: 24,354

Percent increase in reported cases since yesterday: 1%

Percent increase in reported cases since 7 days previous: 8%

III. Deaths as a percentage of closed cases so far in the US:

Total Recoveries in US as of yesterday: 854,106

Total Deaths as of yesterday: 117,528

Deaths so far as percentage of closed cases (=deaths + recoveries): 12% (vs. 12% yesterday)

For a discussion of what this number means – and why it’s so important – see this post.

I would love to hear any comments or questions you have on this post. Drop me an email at tom@tomalrich.com