Quote: (05-19-2016 07:06 AM)iamdegaussed Wrote:
It's not the frequency of plane crashes that's putting me off, it's the helplessness of the situation if your plane goes down.
If a boat sinks, I can get on a lifeboat and wait for help.
When I'm in my car, I have some level of control over the outcome in a crash situation. It could be caused by another driver, but at some level my own reflexes come into the equation.
When you're up in the air, you're in the hands of your pilot and those of the mechanics who worked on your plane. If either of those fail, there's really not much you can do.
And I have flown a lot, international and otherwise. Stuff like this is just making me nervous is all.
Completely agree. I'll add to this that there is a palpable (to me) sense of menace every time I have to suffer through a take-off, and I used to fly twice a week every week for 2 years straight without it going away. You're sitting in a machine weighing hundreds of tons, much of its mass composed of jet fuel, and relying on the perfect functioning of millions of individual parts manufactured by thousands of companies all over the world. Moreover, this machine is worked tirelessly; the Airbus in this particular story had 48,000 flight hours on it, which means it was
in the air nearly 6 years! All the while it is subject to stresses of landing, turbulence, and the countless pressurization and depressurization cycles.
All this knowledge is enough to make me feel ill at ease when I'm hurtling down the runway past the no-abort point, and then again when the plane is just a few hundred meters above the ground, banking, and I'm hoping none of its control surfaces jam and cause it to plunge into the ground in the space of 3 seconds.
But yeah, once at cruise I'm pretty relaxed