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Fear of Flying Misplaced
The Travel Critic · November 30, 1999

The possibility that a kamikaze co-pilot intentionally sent EgyptAir Flight 990 to its watery grave has fanned the flames of aerophobia.

It doesn't help that my colleagues in the media are piling on with accounts of pilots becoming increasingly unstable and unpredictable. Never mind that there are no officially confirmed incidents of pilot suicide on commercial carriers. And never mind that people have been killing themselves since there have been, well, people.

"Pilot suicide hasn't increased," says Mark Goulston, a critical events expert at Lifescape.com, a behavioral think tank based in Alexandria, Va., "Media coverage of pilot suicide has increased." But stories keep coming about the stresses of flying a commercial jet - fatigue, jet lag, erratic schedules, crowded skies, heavy responsibility, pressure for on-time departures and arrivals.

But there's just one problem with all this speculation about pilots' mental health. "None of the other incidents have been ruled a suicide," notes John Mazor, a spokesman for the Airline Pilot's Association. "Even though people may have their suspicions - and in some cases, they're pretty strong suspicions - that's really all they are: suspicions."

The greatest suspicions involve the Dec. 19, 1997 SilkAir crash in Indonesia. The Boeing 737 aircraft crashed in a river about 35 miles north of Palembang en route to Jakarta. All seven crew members and 97 passengers were killed.

Questions have been raised by Aviation Week & Space Technology and the Asian Wall Street Journal about the circumstances surrounding the crash, including the fact that both the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder were turned off, and that the pilot had recently lost a small fortune on securities investments.

Among the rank-and-file pilots, the barrage of suicide stories has been greeted with a collective shrug. "I think it's much ado about nothing," says Robert J. Cox, a commercial pilot based in Ponte Vedra, Fla., "There's no trend. It's so laughable that people are saying all of this, we don't even pay attention to it."

Travelers don't necessarily share his attitude. In a recent e-mail, reader Jim Panto wondered how well our system works at ferreting out "those troubled folks who would commit suicide in this way." Who, he asks, "knows the evil that lurks in the hearts and minds of men?"

True enough, Jim, but my point is that pilot suicide is so rare that there's no practical way to screen for it, and it's such an insignificant problem that it's not something we ought to focus on.

According to Airsafe.com, in addition to the EgyptAir crash, there were 10 fatal commercial airline accidents in the world this year. Only one was in the United States (the June 1 American Airlines crash in Little Rock, Ark., that killed one crew member and 10 passengers.) Causes varied: two aircraft overran the runway; two exploded; one ran off the runway during landing; one flipped over while landing; three ran into mountains or high ground; one crashed into the ocean.

National Transportation Safety Board records for previous years show that fatalities remain extremely rare in U.S. commercial aviation. In 1993, the NTSB recorded a single fatality. The following year, there were four accidents and 239 deaths; the year after, two accidents with 166 fatalities, and three accidents with 342 deaths in 1996.

But here's where it gets interesting. In 1997, there were only three accidents and three fatalities, and in 1998, the last year for which numbers are available, there was one accident and one fatality.

Which isn't to discount fear of flying. But if you want something to concern yourself with, worry that your pilot will fall asleep (pilot fatigue is a huge crisis in the aviation industry) or about air rage (mad or drunk passengers invariably head for the cockpit). Worry about bombs, hazardous materials, shoddy aircraft construction, pilot error, air traffic gridlock.

Worry about Y2K, if you must.

Christopher Elliott is a travel commentator and author of A Bridge to Nowhere: A Year in the Florida Keys. All e-mailed questions may be edited, condensed or republished at the site's discretion.