Fear of flying

Yet in the space of two weeks this July, 464 people died in a cluster of three internationally publicised aircraft incidents – the downing of a Boeing 777-200ER operating Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine, the crash of an ATR 72-500 operating TransAsia Airways flight GE222 near Magong on Penghu Island in the Taiwan Strait, and the crash of Air Algérie flight AH5017 in eastern Mali, a wet leased McDonnell Douglas MD-83 operated by the Spanish airline Swiftair.

Readers of Australian Aviation have doubtless been asked by friends, family and colleagues outside the industry whether it is safe to fly – and, indeed, whether it is safe to fly Malaysia Airlines in the context of MH17 and the earlier disappearance of MH370.

Spurred on, perhaps, by a mixture of breathless handwringing and opportunistic scaremongering from the general media, hungry for clicksand eyeballs, assurances that flying is the safest mode of travel do not appear to be reassuring potential passengers in the way they once did.

If a family decides to drive rather than fly, even on the shortest routes, statistics show clearly that their choice is deeply irrational.

But humans are not rational actors even when they have a full range of information, and it can hardly be argued that most passengers have that.

2014 is still one of the safest years in aviation history

It’s still more dangerous to cross the road than to get on a plane. Even despite the three incidents in July and MH370 before that, 2014 is still on track to join its predecessors 2012 and 2013 on the trend towards aviation becoming increasingly more safe.

According to data from the Aviation Safety Network (a service provided by the Flight Safety Foundation, a US-based international nonprofit organisation), July 2014 was the fifth deadliest month in aviation history.

Yet this is purely and simply a cluster effect, a statistical anomaly that three aircraft should have crashed in such short succession for unrelated reasons. 2014 isn’t even close to being aviation’s most dangerous year, either in number of accidents or number of fatalities.

Just two years since 1970 – the two previous, 2012 and 2013 – had fewer incidents in the seven months to July.

Relatively high numbers of passengers on board the two Malaysia Airlines widebody incidents in 2014 mean that the number of fatalities is comparatively high – 721 so far this year, the 12th most since 1970 – yet that’s 12th out of the 44 years considered.

Even while the number of crashes is declining, the numbers of fatalities and the seriousness of injuries is also going down.

Anybody who watched the video of Asiana Airways flight 214 spinning 360 degrees on the horizontal axis and nearly 180 degrees on the vertical axis was stunned that only two fatalities and 12 critical injuries resulted from the crash, with over 120 passengers not even classified as injured. As an industry, we have the wisdom and hard work of investigators into previous accidents, regulators, engineers and designers to thank for that.

Humans are not rational actors even when they have a full range of information. . .

Yet air travel has become so safe that a compounding problem with the statistics (though not with the result) has arisen: incidents are so few as to be statistical anomalies rather than trends – or at least the two are statistically indistinguishable.

The statistical anomaly of two Malaysia Airlines sister Boeing 777-200ER aircraft being involved in relatively quick succession is just that – a statistical anomaly. And, historically speaking, while the MH370 and MH17 incidents resulted in 537 fatalities, a single incident in March 1977 caused more.

Some 583 people were killed on the island of Tenerife in the north Atlantic when a KLM Boeing 747- 200B struck a Pan Am Boeing 747-100 in thick fog with visibility dropping under 100 metres. Yet even that most deadly aircraft accident spurred numerous safety improvements.

Following the Tenerife disaster, a careful and considered professional investigation led to recommendations for changes.

Voice procedures and phraseology changed, with (among others) “line up and wait” introduced and the use of the phrase “takeoff” restricted to actual clearance for takeoff. Nonstandard communication like the KLM flight’s “We’re at takeoff” and TFS tower’s response “OK” was prohibited and has been deprecated in usage.

The industry response to the deadly incidents in July has already started, and the discussions sparked by the disappearance of MH370 have continued.

The focus of the MH370 discussions have been primarily twofold: first, are we now in a place where aircraft can and should be continuously tracked, using existing systems such as ADS-B or new systems yet to be developed? Second, are aircraft (and particularly the Boeing 777) sufficiently hardened to resist known vulnerabilities such as the electronics and engineering (E/E) bay? More recently, the discussions following MH17 have spawned significant action on the international scene. Airlines have been falling over each other to reassure passengers (with various degrees of truth) that their flights have not overflown Ukraine, eastern Ukraine in particular, or other conflict zones like Iraq and Syria.

Behind the scenes as far as passengers are concerned, the International Air Transport Association (IATA), International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), Civil Air Navigation Services Organisation (CANSO) and Airports Council International (ACI) met in late July following the downing of MH17. The meeting resulted in a strongly worded joint statement. Among other focuses, the organisations recognised “the essential need for information and intelligence that might affect the safety of our passengers and crew”, while noting that the issue is a “highly complex and politically sensitive area of international coordination, involving not only civil aviation regulations and procedures but also State national security and intelligence gathering activities”.

In particular, ICAO resolved to “immediately establish a seniorlevel Task Force composed of state and industry experts to address the civil aviation and national security aspects of this challenge, in particular how information can be effectively collected and disseminated,” and to submit findings to an ICAO Council Special Meeting.

The aviation industry also called for ICAO to address “failsafe channels for essential threat information to be made availableto civil aviation authorities and industry” and “the need to incorporate into international law, through appropriate UN frameworks, measures to govern the design, manufacture and deployment of modern anti-aircraft weaponry. ” ICAO will also convene a highlevel safety conference with all 191 member states in February 2015 to take matters further.

But that’s the rub – special meetings must be convened, changes in aviation take time, passengers don’t understand that, February 2015 seems a long time away, and the ever-increasing speed of the news cycle wants answers within minutes, not months.

Failing to recognise or correct that expectation is an unwise decision for the aviation industry to make.

People know flying is safe, but they’re still scared

Intellectually, most passengers know that flying is safe, yet people are still afraid of flying. Repeating assertionshowever true – that flying is the safest mode of transport has not resolved those people’s concerns, however irrational they might be.

No matter whether fear of flying is indeed a phobia (and experts disagree on whether it is), it presents in many different ways for many different reasons.

Part of the fear is a lack of control – control that passengers think they have when travelling via different modes of transport. A driver may think (mostly illogically) that they could avoid an accident or, at the very least, throw themselves from a moving car. A bus or train passenger may think similarly.

Yet, as comedians have been quick to highlight, airline passengers are issued with lifejackets rather than parachutes. Escape from a commercial aircraft at altitude is possible only in Hollywood.

Part of the fear comes from the fact that passengers do not have the information they need to rationally assess risk. This isn’t a particularly unusual state of affairs in the human experience.

Rarely do we have a particularly strong understanding of the relative probability of the consequences to our actions. And we’re particularly unlikely to be able to adequately assess “dread risks” – the low probability but high consequence disasters, tragedies or atrocities that make headlines precisely because they are so shocking. The risk of an air accident is, thanks to decades of safety improvements, by definition a dread risk.

Part of the fear is the mystery and impenetrability of much of the air travel experience. Whereas many (perhaps most) people likely to be potential air travellers have a rudimentary understanding of how a car or train works, aviation is significantly complex in all aspects. From the hurry-up-and-wait

There are few if any consequences (other than expert opprobrium) for incorrect, premature or misleading information.

experience of arriving at the airport and checking in, through being scanned and examined at security (and perhaps even being required by security forces to take off some of your clothing), to the hustle and bustle of the terminal, air travel can be exhaustingly confusing even before stepping foot on an aircraft.

Part of the fear is the unusual and unexplained sensations on board, from the particular smell of a commercial aircraft, to the need to be strapped in to a seat, to the safety demonstrations (and the what-ifs that demonstrations kick off for someone afraid of flying), all before takeoff. Being pressed into the seat by acceleration as the engines roar, the feeling of dropping at the moment of rotation, and the clunks and thumps as landing gear, flaps and slats retract can also be unsettling. Even at cruise altitude, turbulence is always a possibility (and reminders to that end are frequent), lurking invisibly to terrify a frightened passenger.

And a last part of the fear of flying puzzle is, in a seeming contradiction with the impenetrability of the “whys” of air travel, the familiarity of travelling by air combined with the unlimited power of the human imagination.

Whether we fly frequently or not, our minds piece together what we think it must have been like for the passengers on board an air crash.

Whether we have the information correct (to a greater or lesser extent depending on our knowledge of aviation) is actually irrelevant to our mind’s imaginings. It’s easy to see how a person could develop a fear of flying without even stepping on board an aircraft.

And that lack of knowledge has never stopped the general media (often with the assistance of a regrettable number of self-titled experts) from helping to generate and elaborate on people’s fears.

Communicating statistics to affect behaviour is complex and difficult

US research published in Scientific American following the September 11 2001 attacks concluded that taking a domestic flight presents the same fatality risk as driving fewer than 11 miles. (Of course, the level of risk repeats every 11 miles on the road, yet stays roughly constant regardless of the length of flight, since aviation incidents overwhelmingly occur during takeoff or landing and do not correlate to the length of cruise flight. ) Yet in a Paragon Insights poll of nearly 2,000 US adults taken between July 25 and 27 2014, just 53 per cent said that they thought flying was safer than driving, and 34 per cent said that the late July air crash cluster made them less likely to fly. (The poll’s margin for error is 2. 3 per cent. ) The many potential air travellers who avoided – and, indeed, some who continue to avoid – the skies out of fear actually placed themselves in greater danger by taking ground transportation.

In over a decade since the post- 9/11 research, air travel has continued to become safer, with fewer accidents and fewer fatalities despite continually growing traffic worldwide, including in countries where safety standards may not be consistent with international best practice. Unfortunately, that isn’t as good a sound bite on 24-hour news as “is it still safe to fly?” With in-depth analysis, expert commentary and investigative journalism on the decline in favour of on-the-scene coverage by perfectly coiffed (or on-location artfully dishevelled) anchors, the impetus is for online clicks and viewer eyeballs over accuracy and responsibility. Moreover, there are few if any consequences (other than expert opprobrium) for incorrect, premature or misleading information.

And the lack of expertise retained within the general media means that unverified information and amateur photography and videography are increasingly important. This in and of itself makes an air incident that might previously have seemed remote seem more imminent and real.

Mocht hij verdwijnen, zo ziet hij d’r uit

“If it disappears, this is what it looks like”, Dutch MH17 passenger Cor Pan wrote on Facebook before departing, with a picture of the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777- 200ER taken from the terminal – a picture we might all take, and a joke that we might make to our industry colleagues or enthusiast friends.

The rise of increasingly available amateur photographs and video contributes to the media trend of repeating what happened rather than analysing what it might mean. In the same time period as the late July air incident cluster, Sunwing Airlines flight 772 returned to Toronto Pearson International Airport after a passenger became significantly disruptive. Regional tactical police arrested the passenger on arrival in a manner that could easily be called “storming the plane” – and we know this because a passenger recorded the event, seemingly on a mobile phone.

The image in the zeitgeist of previous air accidents like Pan Am 103 are the professional pictures, such as the iconic image taken by the UK Air Accident Investigation Branch of the forward section of the Boeing 747-100 Clipper Maid of theSeas on the ground near Lockerbie.

Now, it is the mobile phone images of US Airways 1549 taken through the windows of rescuing ferries in the Hudson River off New York, or the grainy surveillance video of Asiana 214 hitting the San Francisco International Airport seawall and spinning through the air.

It all makes modern incidents personal: you could be on that plane; you could be recording that video, with your phone; you could be jumping off that evacuation slide; you could be taking a Facebook picture of that aircraft.

It all makes a significant number of people afraid of flying. And the tendency to brush aside these flyers’ experiences with a “flying is very safe”, or even to ridicule fears, is not the way to counteract them.

Fear of flying courses are remarkably successful

Airlines and partner organisations in Australia and worldwide offer fear of flying courses to help people conquer their fears. In Australia, the Qantas-affiliated Fearless Flyers was established in 1978 by a cadre of women pilots following research by Boeing estimating that nearly a quarter of the population was afraid of flying.

(In a quirk of history, Nancy- Bird Walton, the aviatrix for whom Qantas’s Airbus A380 VH-OQA, involved in the QF32 incident on departure from Singapore in 2010, was named, was one of the founding professionals involved in Fearless Flyers. ) Fear of flying courses generally start out covering basic fear psychology, helping flyers validate their fears, understand how and why they occur, and provide self-help relaxation techniques to mitigate them.

Technical information is also provided at an appropriate level todemystify the impenetrable air travel experience and explain the how and why of aviation safety, further reducing the unknown element of fears. The courses usually cover the basic science of flight (Fearless Flyers calls this the “What makes an aeroplane fly” section), plus a working understanding of aviation weather forecasting, meteorology and weather, as well as a specific section on the causes and effects of turbulence, plus how aircraft and airline systems mitigate their effects.

There’s almost always a chance to speak with real pilots, cabin crew, engineers and other safety professionals, whose qualifications are outlined beforehand. Their roles in ensuring safety, and the roles of flight dispatchers, air traffic controllers, and others within the aviation system are also covered.

These courses are remarkably successful, and in nearly 40 years of operation Fearless Flyers quotes a total of over 1,500 graduates. Yet that is a minuscule proportion of the population that is afraid of flying.

How do we replicate the success of fear of flying courses more widely? The commercial aviation industry has clearly identified a 1:1 method to reduce the fear of flying experienced by its passengers. But with only seven Australia-based courses, each spanning several days, offered throughout 2013 in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth, the numbers of flyers helped is limited by sheer practical considerations.

Other countries’ offerings are similarly limited.

Yet airlines can and must do more.

Purely from an economic demand point of view, if helping people to conquer their fears means those people fly more frequently, there is a significant market opportunity to increase demand for air travel. It’s also good business sense to reassure your customers that you are unlikely to cause them serious harm.

Options to reduce the fear of flying more widely are expansive, yet not necessarily expensive.

The experience and ability to develop them are out there, both in psychology and in aviation.

A series of online videos on YouTube or Vimeo could be a good start, potentially breaking down the multi-day courses into bite-sized pieces accessible to the widest number of people. In the age of Melbourne’s Metro Trains’ incredibly popular “Dumb Ways To Die” rail safety message, catchy videos are certainly an attractive proposition for a significant section of the demographic.

Broadcast television is an option, although webcasting through technologies such as ABC iview or distributing episodes via iTunes, Google Play, Amazon or Netflix seem more likely to be the way of the future.

An interactive app could well be another way to go, providing a guided experience that might allow people suffering from fear of flying to concentrate on the specific issues concerning them and their type of fear of flying.

Early education and later life education programs could help to reduce fear of flying for younger and older flyers respectively, two groups with a higher than average time opportunity for travel.

And complementary apps, podcasts, booklets, audio downloads and aide-memoire information on a companion website could round out the offering.

The current discussion within and outside the commercial aviation industry offers an unusual opportunity to act on fear of flying.

Failing to do so would be an excellent chance lost.