My Weird Fascination With Airplane Disasters

I have a weird fascination with airplane disasters. I don't think it's based on some premonition that I'll depart this world as my Airbus experiences a catastrophic mechanical failure. Perhaps it has to do with a childhood interest in aviation mixed with the engineering geek in me wondering how something so large could somehow go airborne - and how something so powerful and intricately designed could malfunction so terribly. 

Over the years, I would pour over magazine articles detailing the Korean Airlines Flight 007 (shot down by a Soviet fighter jet), United Airlines Flight 232 (a miracle crash landing in a Iowa cornfield) and USAir Flight 427 (catastrophic rudder failure on a 737 - a model I used to fly every week as a consultant). I'd watch National Geographic shows like Seconds From Disaster which provided dramatizations of the events leading up to the crash.

Interestingly, I was traveling by air during the days of two major plane disasters. Just last week on early Monday morning, an Air France jetliner went down in the Atlantic en route to Paris from Rio. As we were planning to board our plane from Newark Airport to Aruba, Sarah and I watched CNN from our gate, which reported breaking news of a missing airliner. Many years ago in 1992, I had a similar experience when I had flown to Los Angeles on a TWA airliner to visit my cousins and a friend who's mother was dying of cancer. When I landed that evening, my cousin said to me, "Wow, weren't you a little freaked out after you heard the news?"

"What are you talking about?"

"A different TWA airplane flying from New York crashed. I think everyone died." The flight she was referring to was TWA Flight 800, which was brought down apparently from an electrical short in a near empty fuel tank.

But just remember folks, the safety of flying commercial airliners are unmatched - as long as your measuring by deaths per mile and not deaths per trip.