The Airport Chaos Is the Product of Negligence

Modern air travel has become so grueling that it is easy to lose sight of its greatest, near-miraculous achievement: Commercial airline travel is astonishingly safe—yes, even given the two horrific 737 Max crashes over the past 18 months, and even considering the primitive-terror factor that makes the prospect of death in the sky so much more frightening than most other fates.

In a recent period of more than nine years, there were no crash-related deaths aboard U.S. airliners. (That period ran from February 2009, when a Colgan commuter plane crashed in icing conditions, on approach to Buffalo, until April 2018, when debris from an engine explosion on a Southwest flight destroyed a window, killing the passenger sitting nearby.)

Fifty people were killed in that first accident; one person in the second. But in between those tragedies, every single 5 and 10 million flights per year), carrying more than 5 billion passengers. Not all of those 5 billion literally walked off the planes: Some were in wheelchairs, others had suffered in-flight medical emergencies or even died. But during a period when roughly 100 Americans were dying each day in car crashes, and another 100 from guns, absolutely no one was killed in a U.S. airline accident.