There’s been quite a bit in the news this year about planes and airports. The problems with Terminal 5 at Heathrow and the crash landing in January of flight BA038 from Beijing which landed short of the runway. I also flew to Dubai in February and although I’ve always been a happy flier it did get me thinking about the January accident. Fortunately all the 136 passengers and 16 crew survived. As much as the news is full of air crashes and various aviation disasters this was the first crash at Heathrow since June 1972, 36 years ago. On 18 June 1972 G-ARPI operating as BEA 548 crashed in a field close to the Crooked Billet public house, Staines, 2 minutes after taking off. It was the worst accident that ever happened at Heathrow killing all 188 passengers and crew, making up 72% of all of the 261 fatalities caused by accidents at the airport.
Why you may ask is he going on this morbid track; well I’ve had an interest in statistics since I did it for ‘A’ level at school. I’ve never really understood why the mean is always quoted in the news and in the papers, I think the mode is a far more appropriate average, with the mean it can give you a figure which doesn’t actually apply to anyone, anyway may be that’s for another blog. The thing is why with people and the media in particular is there this hunger for the sensational? The fact that more people get killed on our roads in a month than in the whole history of Heathrow doesn’t make it the lead story on the news. The most recent figures I could find were 3,201 deaths in 2005(nearly 9 a day) of those 671 were pedestrians accounting for 21% of all deaths from road accidents. Again The headlines often focus on the extreme, obviously it doesn’t get much worse than death, but that’s only 1.18% of the problem, the total number of road casualties of all severities was approximately 271,000(742 a day) in 2005. The most minor of these causing some disruption to people’s lives, the more serious changing their lives forever.
A life is a life, what makes one life more important than another? I have a question if this is the human condition, what function to the human race does, this disproportionate emphasis on the sensational and extreme provide? If an extreme loss of life were to happen in a industry or situation that continuously has high levels of fatalities then the focus on the extreme would or could stir the collective mind into action, but this isn’t the case with the air line industry it actually has one of the safest if not THE safest records of any mode of transport.
One of the main purposes of life is to survive, to pass on our DNA to the next generation, our bodies have been designed to minimise any misfortunes and continue our own existents, the symmetry of the body giving us a spare of a lot of organs in case one breaks. However why, when it comes to the mind could be argued the reverse is the case. Peoples self destructive nature and dispositions to danger often appears dominant
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