Why Boeing Being Serially Sorry Doesn't Fly
Flying is, of course, safer than driving. It’s safer than so many activities we do without thinking. “The risk is so low that being afraid to fly is a little like being afraid to go into the supermarket because the ceiling might collapse,” says MIT’s Dr. Barnett, who authored a 2020 study on the matter.
Two interesting tidbits from the study. First, the worldwide risk of being killed has kept dropping, by a factor of two, every decade. And two, it is significantly safer to fly in countries with strong aviation regulations (like the US, EU, China, Canada, etc) than some countries in Latin America and Africa. But even in those countries, it’s still far, far safer than driving.
But flying is scarier! Instead of hurling ourselves across asphalt in metal tubes that we control, we are hurling ourselves across the sky, 10,000 feet in the air, in metal tubes we don’t control. My former boss, an ambassador who has spent her career globetrotting and showed no fear negotiating with the Taliban in Afghanistan or fleeing bullets in Haiti, is afraid of flying. The fear of flying is common because flying is something our reptile brains could never have prepared us for. And so it rightfully inspires fright.
This is, I would argue, a good thing. Our collective fear of flying is why it is, in fact, so safe. It’s safe because the public has demanded that it be safe, that we apply the highest possible levels of scrutiny to the planes, the pilots, the airports, the air traffic controllers, and the entire aviation system. And so it is also a good thing that when someone in the aviation chain screws up, they get hauled before Congress to justify their actions and explain what went wrong and what they’ll do better.
And perhaps it’s why, if you keep screwing up on something so monumentally important as aviation safety, even a decent apology won’t cut it. That’s what I wrote about for my column this week in McSweeney’s, along with a broader argument about why repeated apologies fail. You can read it by clicking below!
Sorry Not Sorry: Why Boeing Being Serially Sorry Doesn’t Fly - McSweeney’s Internet Tendency
A 2023 Column Contest grand-prize winner, Laurence Pevsner’s Sorry Not Sorry investigates why we’re sick of everyone apologizing all the time—and h...
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