Germanwings co-pilot’s actions undermine a unique trust

The bare facts of the crash of Germanwings flight 4U9525 – 150 dead, including 16 German schoolchildren and two infants – were horrific enough before it emerged that the aircraft was most likely intentionally downed by the co-pilot, Andreas Lubitz.

That scenario, as German chancellor Angela Merkel put it, "goes beyond what we can imagine".

After last year’s mysterious disappearance of MH370, the shooting down of a Malaysia Airlines flight over Ukraine and the loss of AirAsia flight QZ8501 in December, it might seem that air disasters are becoming more common, particularly with the blanket coverage these incidents have generated.

They are always accompanied by the familiar refrain that air travel is far and away the safest form of mass transport, which should be enough to remind us that these incidents are the focus of so much attention “because” of the very exceptional circumstances surrounding them. Indeed, the reliability and safety of modern air travel practically guarantees that any crashes are the result of unusual or unpredictable factors, an unpredictability that in turn generates more media coverage.

Deadliest crashes

As pilot and aviation writer Patrick Smyth put it this week, “In years past, we didn’t have a 24/7 news cycle with media outlets spread across multiple platforms, all vying simultaneously for your attention . . . I frequently remind people of the year 1985, when 27 serious accidents killed upwards of 2,500 people. That includes two of history’s 10 deadliest crashes occurring within two months of each other. Imagine the circus if such a thing happened today.”

Of course, air travel differs from rail or road travel in that passengers have to place a much higher level of trust in the airlines and the pilots – possibly only in the operating theatre do people put as much trust in the hands of others.

The actions of Lubitz will seriously undermine that trust, and the industry will have to take significant steps to reassure passengers. However, we don’t interpret events through a prism of statistical probability, as was made all too clear in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Understandably, perhaps, many Americans chose to make journeys by road rather than risk becoming a victim of another attack.

Understandable fear

The fact that the risk of dying in a road accident is far greater than the risk of dying in an air crash or terrorist attack was lost on people acting out of understandable fear. It was not until 2006 that the true cost of such instinctive reactions became clear – German psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer examined 10 years’ of US road fatality data and calculated it took a year for normal air traffic patterns to resume after 9/11, and in that year an extra 1,595 people died in car crashes, a direct result of people avoiding air travel.

That is more than 50 per cent of the fatalities on September 11th itself. The importance of maintaining perspective in the aftermath of highly unusual events cannot be more starkly illustrated.