5 years after the Wright Brother’s first flight, Thomas Selfridge had the somewhat dubious honour to become the first person to die in an airplane crash, when a demonstration flight piloted by Orville Wright crashed¹.

Since then, airplane safety standards have improved greatly, making air travel one of the safest methods, far more safer than driving. In the US, you are, statistically speaking, more likely to die from a fall, an unintentional poisoning, or being murdered.

The biggest improvement to airplane safety are the national transportation safety boards. Whenever an accident happens, even if it is only a burst tire, they collect information about what happened, and look at possible recommendations or new rules to distribute to manufacturers, airlines, and pilots. They examine everything, starting with the airplane itself, to the crew, the air traffic controllers, as well as the weather.

On March 27th, 1977 a KLM Boeing 747 collided with a taxiing Pan Am 747 while taking off from Tenerife airport, killing 583 passengers and crew, making it the deadliest airplane accident to date². Afterwards, the investigation showed multiple contributing factors, like the dense fog (preventing the KLM from seeing the Pan Am taxiing down the runway), but also had a lasting effect on the communication both between air traffic control, as well as inside the cockpit, highlighting that the Captain of an aircraft is not infallible, and should consider input by his crew.

When Air France Flight 447 crashed in the Atlantic Ocean on June 1st, 2009, the subsequent investigation uncovered that part of the problem was the crew’s overload with information in the cockpit, making it harder for them to see what the actual problem was, contributing to the eventual crash, again leading to recommendations for additional instrumentation as well as training for pilots.

All these and many other investigations of deadly crashes and other incidents have lead to a greatly increased safety of modern airliners. It has also lead to a safety culture where even small incidents are reported, because even if no one got hurt, the safety board might be able to see a statistical pattern that could improve the safety of everyone.

Other interesting links from around the web:

• Private Lives in a Public Era — Sci-Fi author John Scalzi on how we live our lives much more publicly nowadays.
• Ketamine Stirs Up Hope—and Controversy—as a Depression Drug — Right now, it’s used as an anesthetics and party drug.
• Here Are the 14 Habits of Highly Miserable People — If you want to achieve the goal, it can be very useful to look at what not to do.
• The color photographs of World War I — We’re used to seeing black & white photos from events long past. Seeing these events in colour can make them seem more real to us.

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A pair of Asian chefs demonstrate the art of making noodles by hand

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