Increasing aviation safety in developing countries is a low priority for Charles Kenny:
The macabre but exhaustive website planecrashinfo.com put the odds of being killed on a single airline flight at about one in 4.7 million across 78 major world airlines; among the airlines with the worst safety records, the odds rise to one in 2 million. In the middle of the last decade, the fatal crash rate for Kenya Airways was about three in 1 million. For Ethiopian Airlines, it was four in 1 million. That’s higher than that of U.S. carriers such as American Airlines (0.6 fatal crashes per 1 million flights) or United (0.5 per million)—but it still suggests flying is safe, and that the gap between poor and rich countries is small.
That’s not true for driving.
While it’s widely known that flying is statistically safer than driving, just how much safer varies from country to country. Data from the World Health Organization and the World Bank suggest that, in the U.S., there are 1.4 fatalities per year for every 10,000 cars on the road. In Malaysia, there are seven; in Kenya, 87—more than 60 times the rate in the U.S., compared with about a fivefold gap in air safety. Given how often people drive, and how indispensable car travel is in most countries, the gap in developing countries’ road safety records is far more troubling than their air safety records are impressive.
In other MH370-inspired commentary, Emily Yoffe uses psychology to explain our fascination with flight 370:
[I]t’s the specific nature of the disappearance of Flight 370 that pings some of our most basic cognitive drives. In their book The Scientist in the Crib, Alison Gopnik, Andrew Meltzoff, and Patricia Kuhl write, “Babies become interested in, almost obsessed with, hiding-and-finding games when they are about a year old. There is the timeless appeal of peekaboo. … Babies also spontaneously undertake solo investigations of the mysterious Case of the Disappearing Object.” So, from our earliest days, we focus our attention on objects that are hidden, and then revealed. This consuming play, they write, “contributes to babies’ ability to solve the big, deep problems of disappearance, causality, and categorization.” No wonder we’re watching CNN’s nonstop coverage of a disappearing object.
The Dish 