An air accident and the mysteries of the universe
The chance of dying in an air accident is extremely low. Why these people?
Last week, Brazil had the worst air accident in 17 years. The 62 people on board VoePass flight 2283, which was traveling from Cascavel to Guarulhos, died after the ATR 72-500 aircraft crashed into a residential complex in Vinhedo, in the state of São Paulo. The causes are still under investigation.
Any air accident that causes many deaths provokes shock. When it happens in your country, with citizens from your country, and with the aircraft crashing near the home of a college friend, it's even worse.
When the last major accident occurred on Brazilian soil in 2007, I was only 16 years old and had never flown before. It was a very distant world. Nowadays, I’ve lost count of how many flights I’ve taken in my life, especially post-pandemic. Flying has become part of my world, that’s is why I’m sharing some reflections on this in today’s edition.
I get a little annoyed by the divine protections my father sends me before every flight, as if the aircraft were on the verge of crashing. It’s exactly the opposite: according to the International Air Transport Association (IATA), 2023 was the safest year in commercial aviation history, with only 30 accidents, one of them fatal, in Nepal in January 2023, with 72 deaths. There were almost 38 million flights. In other words, statistically, a person would have to fly on a commercial plane daily for 103.000 years to experience a tragedy, a 0.03 chance.
Even if we consider all kind of aviation, there were 1.292 deaths in 5.316 accidents last year. The number of deaths from road accidents is infinitely higher: in 2023, according to the World Health Organization, it was 1.19 million. It’s much harder to calculate the probability in this mode of transportation —road conditions, vehicle maintenance, etc., vary much more than in aviation— but some calculations are around 1% over a lifetime.
It’s easy, however, to understand why my father doesn’t have the same concern when I’m on the road or on a bus. The magnitude of an airplane and the complexity of a flight make a human feel small and helpless. Even though I love flying and feel very safe up there, I constantly think about the horror that must be the last seconds of life in an aircraft. On the road you feel like you have more control. You don’t. Again, it should be the opposite: aviation is handled by professionals with tons hours of experience, while on the roads we cross 16-year-old drunk teenagers.
The collective tragedy is another aspect that makes air accidents more shocking. Interrupting 62 life stories at once is much more terrifying than deaths in smaller numbers on the roads, which will be felt only by family and friends. The same applies to the pandemic: we would be much more stunned if the five thousand daily deaths spread across the country happened in the same city or the same hospital.
Even those afraid of flying do so because it’s necessary. A CEO or a football player wouldn’t exist in the contemporary world without constant flights. In this Brazilian tragedy, two pieces of information made me reflect. The victims' families flew to the accident site. You must be so cold-blooded in this moment. There is no option otherwise. Another morbid thing is that the victims' bodies would be flown to the cities where they would be buried. This time, they will reach their destination.
Finally, not to take up more of your time, readers, I thought a lot about fate when I read about people on the list of the dead who were flying for the first time. If the chance of dying is so low, why these people? Why on their first time? Multiple small coincidences lead someone to be on or off a fatal flight. There’s no explanation, and there never will be.
