An aviation expert explains why high-profile plane crashes don’t mean it’s statistically unsafe to fly
Losing ‘Wheel of Fortune,’ Trudeau after hours, and unmade decisions (Issue #290)
Last year, in issue #62, we featured Admiral Cloudberg, aka Kyra Dempsey, the aviation expert who’s published over 300 plane crash investigations on Medium. If you dig deep into Dempsey’s archive, you’ll see that most of these tragedies are the result of miscommunication, misperception, or bad UX (often, all three).
To give you a sense of the research that goes into each post, here’s last December’s 86-minute read on EgyptAir flight 804. It was traveling from France to Cairo in May 2016 before mysteriously disappearing into the Mediterranean Sea. For nearly a decade, investigators insisted the cause might’ve been a terrorist attack. Based on a close examination of evidence released last fall, Dempsey concludes the true cause was an accidental freak fire originating via a short circuit in the cockpit’s oxygen system.
“As human beings, we have an easier time understanding such horror when there’s someone behind it, some criminal pulling the strings,” writes Dempsey. Our need to find fault can blind us to reality, where causation tends to be more ambiguous.
Plane crashes are in the discourse lately, given budget cuts to the FAA and an uptick in high-profile aviation accidents. The Potomac crash in January was the deadliest U.S. air disaster in nearly a quarter-century.
But… is it really more dangerous to fly now? Or do we just perceive aviation as more dangerous given (a) government cuts, and (b) the high-profile nature of some of these recent crashes?
I asked Dempsey via email. She replied (emphasis is mine):
In terms of global safety record, we can’t say how safe 2025 is going to turn out to be, and frankly the number of crashes or fatalities in any individual year is pretty random and subject to extreme fluctuation. It’s much more useful to look at a 5 year rolling average. And if we look at the safety trend worldwide over the last five years, it’s the safest aviation has ever been, and there’s not a statistically significant increase over previous years; if anything, the trend line is flat.
Dempsey is concerned about aspects of the U.S. aviation system that have been dicey for years (specifically, keeping planes apart in crowded landing zones). But those trends don’t, in Dempsey’s view, map clearly to the high-profile accidents we’ve seen lately.
“There is no obvious common trend or issue affecting all of the recent accidents, so their occurrence back to back is likely coincidental,” she concludes. (That’s comforting, as I do have some travel coming up!)
P.S. The FAA has its own Medium publication, Cleared for Takeoff, which recently shared a story about one way the agency ensures flight safety: installing beds of crushable material around runways, so if a plane under- or overshoots its runway by up to 1,000 feet, you’ll be okay.
🌎 What else we’re reading…
- Software engineer Nidhi Jain has nine lessons for anyone who wants to get promoted, including: Don’t just opine about what’s wrong; propose a better solution and then actually do it.
- Michael A. Kroll appeared on Wheel of Fortune recently, lost, and lived to tell the tale. Amongst all the cameras and ultra-sophisticated mics, he was “surprised by such low-tech throwbacks as the cue cards — posters with hand-lettered questions that host Ryan Seacrest uses to introduce… each contestant.”
- “I often remind myself that every day is a privilege to do what I do,” writes Adam Scotti, Justin Trudeau’s official photographer for the last 15 years. On Medium, he drops hundreds of behind-the-scenes photos of the former Prime Minister road-tripping around Canada (and the world):
🤔 Your daily dose of practical wisdom
Most of your problems are just unmade decisions. (Victor Mong)
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