Airplane Disasters

07-04-23 00 / episode: 81

Script

Airplane disasters.

Wow, that's a big subject.

I could talk about all sorts of things.

The first thing I'll mention is safety or shall we say perceived safety? That's what we think is safe.

There are many people who believe that or they perceive that airplanes are dangerous.

I can understand why they would feel that way.

You're in a small metal body, thousands and thousands of meters up in the air with not really very much holding you up.

It would be very easy to fall down and crash and indeed crashes happen.

So now there's a couple things.

Why do crashes happen and how often do they happen? Hm.

Crashes sometimes happen because people make a mistake, like they put the wrong part in the engine and it breaks or the engine gets old and nobody says it's getting old and it breaks while you're flying in the air.

Well, they do really, really strict laws to make sure that everybody checks those airplanes super well before they fly so that nothing could break up there.

It still happens but it's pretty unlikely.

Another one is just bad luck, really bad weather that nobody could predict.

And that could cause the airplane to crash and then there's, uh, running into birds.

If the bird goes into your engine, it could break the engine.

But usually birds fly in groups, a flock of birds hits your airplane and you could be in real trouble.

You might not have enough engine power to keep on flying.

Ok.

Then there's other human uh problems.

Somebody puts a bomb on the airplane or deliberately breaks part of the airplane to make it crash.

That's truly horrible.

And that happens, unfortunately.

Ok.

Now, having said that most airplanes don't crash, airplanes have a truly remarkable record of being safe.

They're much safer than driving your car.

Imagine that getting into your car is more dangerous than getting into an airplane.

Well, that's a surprise, but in fact, it's been found to be true again and again, I'm gonna go flying next time.

How about you?