The Pittsburgh Press (February 2, 1946)
I DARE SAY —
About airline disasters
By Florence Fisher Parry
On the first page, as usual, with the gruesome pictures to follow, is the news of another air transport crash with (it is assumed) 21 lives lost.
And countless thousands of otherwise reasonable, intelligent persons will be seized with a renewed dread and distrust of air travel and vow they will never travel by plane until flying becomes “safer.”
The statistics seem to avail nothing. The fact that over a million miles can be flown with only two accidents in one year, means nothing.
Here is the headline on the front page. Here are the pictures of the awful wreckage. So we get into our own cars, make for the icy highways, and in a few hours’ driving expose ourselves to far more danger of death and accident than would be our risk if we boarded any of the 70 scheduled transport planes which land and take off at the Allegheny Airport EVERY DAY.
Why do the newspapers carry these streamers, fill front page positions and give great space to this airplane disaster?
Because it’s news.
It is such an UNUSUAL piece of news that it is featured in the paper’s most conspicuous position.
Let’s be fair
Do you see great front-page headlines over news of auto accidents in which lives are lost? Sometimes, yes; but only when it is a local accident; when the readers are likely to know the victims. But suppose the newspapers would report all today’s auto accidents which have occurred all over the United States? Suppose we’d print news of the auto accidents just in the state of Washington, in the state of Idaho – as we have printed the news of this far-distant plane wreck? The pages would be full of nothing but reports of auto accidents.
Auto accidents are so common that they’re not news.
Now if the airlines were suffering frequent plane accidents, you’d find that the news reports of them would be casual and routine, only those affecting passengers from Pittsburgh, or public notables, would appear on the front page, if there.
When the newspapers stop “playing” airplane and railroad disasters, then and then only need we become uneasy about these two reliable modes of travel. As long as a railroad wreck or a plane crash rates a big write-up and pictures, we can feel reassured.
It’s amazing how many persons are still plane shy. Not the young people, they accept flying as we, when we were young, accepted autos. The war telescoped years, in this respect; put flying ahead a quarter of a century.
But with the older ones of us, we simply HAVEN’T accepted flying, and can’t until we actually fly, ourselves. As long as we haven’t stepped into a plane and taken off and landed, we belong to the unconverted, in our hearts we’re scared of flying.
And there is no experience to which one can so quickly become accustomed as flying. You feel like a veteran after your very first flight.
It is only on long flights that flying is as cheap as travel by rail. From Pittsburgh to Los Angeles, for example, the cost is about equal – that is, if you reckon first-class railroad fare, not day-coach. But very soon these rates will be bound to change. Competition will be keen and the price of air travel is bound to drop to a point where it will be just as cheap to fly a short distance as to go on the train.
Railroads good example
At present it cost about four cents a mile to travel by air. That means that the airlines are patronized mostly by high-salaried executives and movie stars. But soon there will be a demand for short-line airplanes for the rank and file who want to use them as they now do their “accommodation” trains – and at two cents a mile.
There likely will have to be a consolidation of some airlines if only to reduce overhead. If some joint basis of operation could be inaugurated, some over-all consolidation of services, on such matters as meteorology, ground crews, gas servicing, etc., we’d have something approximating the railroads’ peerless co-operation.
Meanwhile, the airlines are doing a remarkably swell job. A lot of growing has been done by those who claim that the airlines’ prated “all-weather service” is still talk and no performance. As a matter of fact, plenty of flights are being cancelled; but that is on the safety side and we shouldn’t gripe about the best insurance the airlines can give us – precaution.
We are told that we’ll have to wait two or three years before radar, television and other secret war devices are released by the Army and Navy, and we’re apt to be pretty sore over the delay.
Yet how inconsistent we are! How many years have we been driving autos with the worst possible equipment against weather? Amateurish windshield wipers that stick at the most crucial times; headlights that web and blind and cause more so-called “hit-and-run” deaths than any other instrument of destruction on the road.
We put up with obsolete chains on our tires, minimum visibility for the sake of streamlines, and brakes that are by no means reliable. We think nothing of faring forth on the highways and cupping it up to 80 miles an hour on tires that aren’t fit to take us around the block.
We risk our lives in taxis that are falling apart after over half a million miles of mileage. Sudden death is so common on our highways that it barely rates a news picture.
Yet one airplane crash, out in Idaho 3000 miles away, and we’re Off flying For Life – or at least until next week.