Let's Quit Talking About Safety

SUCH DISCUSSION IS OFTEN SELF-DECEPTIVE

- John King

The assertions are meant to be comforting, and they are — especially after a crash. They assure the public of the firm resolve by people in power to do better. The problem is these words aren’t, and can’t be, true.

You can’t start an engine without compromising safety. If safety were our No. 1 priority, we’d never move an airplane. Clearly, going somewhere is in itself a demonstration that moving the airplane ranks ahead of safety. It would always be safer to stay put. These little intellectual dishonesties tend to end discussion and substitute for genuine analysis on the subject.

It can be discomforting to talk openly and honestly about safety, so we often make false assurances and otherwise deceive ourselves. For instance, we usually talk about safety as if it were an absolute. But absolute safety is an impossibility. In reality, safety is relative. Every activity has a greater or lesser degree of risk associated with it. Still, when someone departs on a trip, we usually say, “Have a safe trip,” as a polite expression of goodwill. We say this when we know having a genuinely safe trip is literally impossible.

Not only do we find it uncomfortable to admit to ourselves that we can never achieve absolute safety, but we sometimes utterly lie to ourselves not to have to face reality about safety.

General aviation pilots frequently used to tell themselves, and their passengers, that the drive to the airport was the most dangerous part of the trip. They wanted to believe that flying their piston-engine general aviation airplane was safer than driving. When it became known that the fatality rate per mile in a general aviation airplane was seven times that of driving, they had a very hard time accepting that reality. (On the other hand, for various reasons, travel on the airlines is in fact seven times safer than travel on the roads.)