In The Midst of Tragedy, A Remarkable Fact

The first thing I saw when I digitally ‘opened’ my Wall Street Journal this morning was a headline about the crash between a military helicopter and an American Airlines jet near the National Airport in Washington, DC. This was jarring, of course, as is the fact that none of the 67 passengers and crew in the two craft are expected to have survived. It is a sad tale with which to start one’s day.

However, as I read about this, the WSJ also told me that this is the first airline crash involving any fatality in the US since 2013. That’s eleven years. That’s astounding. To get a feel for how astounding it really is, I looked for some data – it’s what I do.

This is an estimate, as the numbers are just huge and 11 years is a long time, but according to Statista, US airlines have flown somewhere between 600 and 800 billion domestic passenger miles in each of those 11 years. That adds up to something more than 7 trillion passenger miles flown in the US without a fatality.

In an era and a world in which it sometimes seems that nothing works as it should, that is one remarkable statistic.

Postscript (again): For the record, I wrote and posted this before hearing about DJT’s fact-free statements about the cause of this crash. So, it was not written in response to his remarks. That aside, you would be hard-put to find a more adamant critic of everything DIE (or EDIDA) than me, but maybe it would be worthwhile to wait until people who know something about air transportation have a chance to gather some evidence before declaiming on causes of this crash. And, the numbers I wrote above certainly constitute indirect evidence about the performance of the US air traffic system over the past 11-plus years.