Last week, the country marked the 60th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, a tragedy that wounded the national psyche the way Pearl Harbor did 22 years before and 9/11 did almost four decades later.
Just two weeks after Kennedy’s death, tragedy visited more Americans, though its 60th anniversary will probably not be widely noted. It was on Dec. 8, 1963, that a Pan Am flight traveling from Baltimore to Philadelphia crashed in Elkton, Md., after being hit by lightning. All 81 people onboard were killed.
What’s striking to realize from this vantage point is that a crash of a commercial airliner back in those days was not an uncommon occurrence. The year before, an American Airlines flight traveling from New York to Los Angeles crashed into Jamaica Bay, N.Y., due to a rudder malfunction. In the months after the crash in Maryland, another jet crashed in Louisiana, and a plane traveling to California fell out of the sky after a passenger shot the pilot and first officer. There were other calamities in the years that followed, along with a spate of hijackings in the 1960s and 1970s.
Overall, however, flying was still reasonably safe in those days. According to a study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), there was 1 passenger death per 350,000 customers between 1968 and 1977. Pretty good odds, really.
Fast forward to today. The last commercial airliner to crash in the United States was almost 15 years ago, when a commuter jet went down near Buffalo, N.Y., in February 2009. In the last 10 years, only two people have died as a result of accidents on commercial flights in America. During the same period, more than 300,000 people died in car accidents. Your odds of being in a fatal accident on a commercial flight now are 1 in 11 million.
In other words, the likelihood that you will make it to your destination if you travel on a commercial flight is extraordinarily high.
Sure, air travel today has more than its share of discomforts and frustrations, from tight seating to excessive charges, and it doesn’t have anywhere near the glamor it once did. You’re more likely to find a passenger wearing sweats than a suit in 2023. But most of us would be willing to trade that for the virtually iron-clad guarantee of safety.
Much of the safety we take for granted is the result of improved onboard technology and pilot training. The disasters of the past have also provided lessons on the design and function of planes and they have been upgraded accordingly.
Commercial air travel is a critical part of American life and our economy. And while it’s only human to pine for the old days, particularly as you move into adulthood, there’s no doubt that America is having its best days in the sky right now.
