Mad as a March Hare
Alpine tragedy. 'Nuff said?
Actually, no, that is not enough said.
Airplanes falling out of the sky for no
apparent reason is quite a rational fear. It harks back to our
ancestor's earliest days. The main reason we have stereoscopic vision
is so we can accurately judge how far away that next branch is;
because we all instinctively know that if we miss it we are going to
fall and the fear of falling is inbuilt. It's in our genes.
When we get on a plane that genetic
fear is triggered again. We are afraid of falling. No matter how
many time we are told that flying is safer than crossing a road, we
still feel instinctively frightened. There are, of course, some
people who insist they love flying. They are called idiots or
downright liars.
Still, we all need to fly sometimes as
the alternatives are either too inconvenient, too expensive or just
plain not there. (I did see the other day some crazy idea to make a
land route from Europe to Canada/US via the Bering strait – this
I've got to see! In my lifetime? Not likely.) Check out:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/travelnews/11493681/Plans-for-superhighway-linking-Britain-and-America.html
We get on the plane and we not only
overcome our natural fear, but our problems are compounded by putting
our lives in the hands of a large number of strangers – and the
pilots are only part of it. There's the ground crew, responsible for
seeing that our plane doesn't run into something whilst still on the
ground (you may think this is much preferable to crashing, but the
result is about the same – a plane full of fuel is likely to
explode on the ground if you run into something), the air traffic
controllers, the maintenance crews, the refuelling crews (remember
the guys who didn't put enough go-juice in the BA flight that just
made the runway at Heathrow a few years ago?). The list is long.
And everything has to function perfectly for us to safely arrive at
our destination. No wonder most of us are not all that keen.
All this becomes irrelevant if just one
of the links in the chain becomes broken.
This is what seems to have happened to
the Germanwings flight. The pilot crashed the plane, deliberately.
This is not in the script of possible
frightening situations. Should it be? Probably yes, but no amount
of pre-flight checks are likely to have had much chance of picking up
this scenario. In the old days we would just call it an Act of God.
Perhaps that is the best phrase for it.
