How safe is it, really?

"Michael" wrote in message
om...
"Mike Rapoport" wrote

It seems to me like most pilots here are in denial about the true
risks of what they are doing. I also believe this is the primary
reason we have the product liability climate in GA that we do.

There have been lots of lawsuits against aircraft and component
manufacturers by grieving widows and orphans.

As there have been against companies which do bungee-jumping, parachuting,
hang gliding, mountain climbing, deep-sea fishing, and a million other
activities which any logical person can see require taking risks which can
cause death. "Well, we're going to tie a rubber band around your ankles and
throw you off a bridge."

What it comes down to is acceptance of responsibility. Not a century ago it
was a rare family that hadn't lost one or more young children to disease by
the age of ten and if you survived that there were wars, workplace
accidents, railroad crashes, ships sinking, and a long list of now-routine
illnesses that meant certain death. Today when someone dies in their sixties
we say "so young" and the loss of a child is an agony beyond conception.

We understand everything. We dig tunnels thirty miles long under oceans and
dam rivers to make lakes the size of small countries. We cut peoples' chests
open, stop their hearts to replace a valve or four as if it were just
another engine, and administer a shock to start it all running again.
Satellites a hundred miles above the Earth send images which have turned the
most devastating storms into mere incoveniences. The temperature of the
polar ice cap is three degrees higher than normal? Clearly we are burning
too much fossil fuel!

When an airliner crashes, we suck up five million little bits off the ocean
floor and put it all back together. It takes a year or two, but then a man
in glasses gets up before a screen, and shows a film which explains exactly
what happened. "Here, you see, these indents the size of a dime show where a
cross-member hit, consistent with our theory that a spark in the tank caused
an explosion."

And none of this progress is illusory. The tunnels do not collapse and fill
with water. The patient gets out of bed and three weeks later resumes
hosting his late-night talk show and likely watches his grandchildren
graduate from high school. Airline travel has become safer than driving a
car. Hurricanes in the US regularly cause tens of billions in damage yet
kill hardly any. Men fly, the sick are healed, and oracles predict the
future from their perch in the sky. Have we not become the gods of our own
existence?

The only thing we don't believe in is the unpreventable accident. When
someone dies of cancer, the family sues the doctor for not finding it
sooner. When someone dies in a car crash, the automaker is sued because a
properly-designed car should allow the driver to survive rolling off the
road at sixty miles an hour. Every accident happens for a reason, and since
we know airplanes run out of gas, shouldn't we design ones that can't?

Believe me, the problem runs far deeper than a misplaced belief in the
safety of small planes.

-cwk.