Two commercial airliners were involved in ghastly accidents in the past two weeks, so maybe this isn't the best time to point out that flying today is, by a considerable margin, less dangerous than ever.
Or, come to think of it, maybe it's just the moment to make that point.
On Jan. 2, there was a frightful collision at Tokyo's Haneda airport between a Japan Airlines Airbus A350 that was landing with 379 people aboard and a small Bombardier-built coast guard plane that was preparing to take off to deliver aid to victims of the New Year's Day earthquake in central Japan. The Airbus collided with the Bombardier, turning both into fireballs. Five of the six people on the little coast guard plane died in the inferno, but everyone on the burning airliner evacuated safely.
Three days later, just after an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 9 jet took off from Portland, Ore., an emergency exit door plug — a piece of the fuselage that fills the space where an exit could have been installed — blew off after the plane's ascent to nearly 16,000 feet. With a huge hole in the side of the aircraft, the cabin instantly depressurized. In that terrifying instant, a bunch of passenger items — cell phones, a teddy bear, even the shirt a teenager was wearing — were sucked right out of the plane. But the crew turned the plane around and returned to Portland with no loss of life or even serious injury. An investigation was launched, both Alaska Airlines and United Airlines grounded their Boeing 737 MAX jets, and it was soon discovered that a number of bolts were loose or missing, suggesting that Boeing has some serious internal negligence issues to confront.
Traumatic as those two accidents were, however, both could have been far more deadly — but weren't. No one died on either of the two giant airliners. Despite the gaping hole that ripped open his aircraft three miles above the ground, the Alaska pilot not only kept the plane under control, she landed it safely.
 A plug the size of a door blew out of an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 at nearly 16,000 feet, but the plane landed safely with no deaths or serious injuries. |
"Ironically," observes airline pilot Patrick Smith, who writes "Ask the Pilot" a superb blog about airplanes and air travel, the coverage of the Boeing incident "serves to remind us of just how safe flying has become. In decades past, multiple airline crashes were the norm every year, with hundreds dead at a time. We've grown so accustomed to near-perfect safety that a minor event, without a single injury, wins as much attention in 2024 as a crash that killed two hundred people would've gotten in the 1980s."
In a 2020 study, researchers at MIT crunched the commercial airline fatality rate on a decade-by-decade basis from 1968 through 2017. In the 10 years ending in 2017, that rate was one death for every 7.9 million passenger boardings. In the previous decade (1998-2007), the fatality rate had been one death per 2.7 million passenger boardings — three times as risky. That in turn was much lower than the prior 10 years, 1988-1997, when airline passengers died at a rate of one for every 1.3 million boardings.
Going back further, the pattern is the same. The fatality risk on commercial flights was one per 750,000 during 1978-1987 and one per 350,000 during 1968-1977.
To put that in percentage terms, over a 50-year span, the risk of being killed in a plane accident plunged from 0.0003 percent to 0.0000001 percent. Getting on a plane is not only a safer way to travel than getting behind the wheel of a car, it is safer than any mode of travel. Economist and transportation scholar Ian Savage of Northwestern University calculated fatality rates (deaths per billion passenger miles) for motorcycles, cars and SUVs, ferries, commuter rail and Amtrak, urban mass transit, buses, and commercial airlines. Of them all, flying was the safest option and it wasn't even close. For example, the risk of being killed in a train accident (0.43 deaths per billion passenger miles) was six times the risk of meeting death on a plane.
As Sorcha Bradley recently put it in The Week: "You are far more likely to die driving to the airport than you are to be involved in a deadly plane accident."
How did flying become so secure? Through a continual focus on improving most aspects of aviation safety. Compared to 20 or 30 years ago, airplane infrastructure is far better engineered, pilots are much better trained, aviation software is incomparably more advanced, the investigation of accidents is markedly more sophisticated, and even weather forecasting is significantly more accurate. As long as human beings can err, accidents can still happen — and do, as the events of this month show. But it isn't sheer luck that explains why the last time there was a fatal accident involving a US carrier was in February 2009 — nearly 15 years ago. Airline travel isn't nearly as comfortable, pleasant, roomy, and civilized as it once was. But it is a lot safer. So much so that when a door-sized plug blew out of a packed plane 16,000 feet in the air, everyone on board lived to tell the tale.
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Antisemitism takes the field
The worldwide explosion of anti-Jewish animus, already so visible on college campuses, on social media platforms, and in acts of public vandalism, may show up before long at a sports venue near you.
Even before the Hamas atrocities of Oct. 7 galvanized the current wave of antisemitism, bigotry against Jews was becoming a feature at a number of athletic events.
For years, appearances of the Dutch soccer team Ajax, an Amsterdam-based squad known for its Jewish fan base, has triggered chants of "Hamas! Hamas! Jews to the gas!" from backers of opposing teams. In Belgium, soccer fans have been recorded giving the Nazi salute while chanting about how the SS "burned Jews 'cause Jews burn the best." Reuters reported last summer that "instances of racism and antisemitism are commonplace in Italian stadiums, with fans regularly booing or shouting abuse at Black players, using the word 'Jew' as an insult, and displaying Nazi or fascist symbols."
On this side of the Atlantic, Kyrie Irving, the Brooklyn Nets basketball star, urged his tens of millions of social media followers in 2022 to view a film filled with lies about Jews and Jewish history — such as calling the Holocaust a "major falsehood" established by Jews to "protect their status and power." Irving issued an apology after he was suspended by the Nets, but retracted that apology when he was traded to another team.
In the tony Massachusetts town of Duxbury, the former high school football coach had his team call out words like "rabbi" and "Auschwitz" on the field to direct game plays. The same behavior was reported in the town of Brooklyn, Ohio, last September, where coach Tim McFarland had his players use the word "Nazi" as a play call against Beachwood High School. Not coincidentally, the Cleveland suburb of Beachwood is predominantly Jewish.
"This is not the first time Beachwood student-athletes have been subjected to antisemitic and racist speech," lamented the town's school superintendent, Robert Hardis. "We always hope it will be the last."
Such events are still relatively rare — but for how much longer?
In Yonkers, N.Y., last month, a high school girls basketball game was stopped in the third quarter after the visiting squad was subjected to sickening antisemitic trash talk. The incident occurred on Dec. 4, as Roosevelt High School's varsity team hosted the Leffell School, a Jewish day school. According to the New York Post, Roosevelt players "shot antisemitic slurs at their Jewish opponents, who needed security guards to escort them off the court to safety." One of those slurs, reportedly snarled by a Roosevelt player, was: "I support Hamas, you f–king Jew."
Hostility toward Jewish athletes takes multiple forms. Late last week, just ahead of the world championship competition for Under-19 men's cricket players, South Africa dropped David Teeger as the national team captain. A rising young star in the South African cricket world, Teeger wasn't accused of doing anything wrong. He was demoted because he is Jewish, and South Africa's cricket association, which is hosting the championship tournament, expected anti-Israel protesters to object if a Jewish player led the team — one more indication that anti-Zionism is often indistinguishable from antisemitism.
In a statement that reflected equal parts cowardice and victim-blaming, Cricket South Africa claimed its decision was "in the best interests of all the players, the [South African] U-19 team, and David himself," and claimed it was acting because of the risk of "conflict or even violence." In other words, rather than shoulder its obligation to protect its players and stand up to bigots, the South Africans decided instead to throw the Jewish kid under a bus, while claiming it was for his own good.
Then there is the International Ice Hockey Federation, which has just announced that, "after careful consideration," it is banning the Israeli men's team from the upcoming championship competition in Bulgaria, and the women's team from the tournament in Estonia. Like the cowardly cricket authorities in South Africa, the federation insists it is excluding teams fielded by the world's only Jewish country for their own well-being. This is actually the second instance of discrimination against Israeli players. Israel was scheduled to host the championships, but in the wake of the Oct. 7 massacre by Hamas, the games were yanked away and relocated to Bulgaria. Now, adding insult to injury, the international federation decrees that, "due to safety and security concerns," the Israeli athletes may not play at all.
The federation piously maintains that its decision to block Israel's players from the ice "is not a sanction against the Israeli Federation and does not affect the Israeli Federation's status as a full member in good standing with the IIHF." Gee, of course not: Israeli athletes are being treated as pariahs and blackballed from participation in their sport, but it's not like they're being discriminated against.
The federation can pretend this is all about athlete security, but if it looks, walks, and quacks like an antisemitic duck — well, draw your own conclusion. The decision is reminiscent of the Jim Crow South, when local officials balked at desegregating public schools on the specious grounds that the safety of Black students couldn't be guaranteed. In effect, the international federation is granting Israel's enemies the power to veto Israeli participation in world ice hockey events. If this blackball is sustained, the forces of bigotry will gain legitimacy and the idealistic spirit of athletic brotherhood will recede still further.
Bit by bit, antisemitism is metastasizing in the arena and on the playing field. The damage it will cause should bring a shudder to anyone who cares about sports.
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The greatest endorsement editorial of all time
 My favorite Democratic president |
The Iowa caucuses on Monday marked the official kickoff of the 2024 presidential nomination campaigns, and I, for one, find the prospect depressing. So far, none of the candidates running for president stand out as especially honorable, inspiring, imaginative, or wise, and I have a hard time seeing myself voting for any of them to be the nation's chief executive.
Would that someone like Grover Cleveland — my favorite Democratic president of all time — were in the 2024 field of presidential hopefuls. Before winning the White House in 1884, Cleveland had served as mayor of Buffalo, N.Y., and then as governor of New York. In both positions, he had acquired a reputation for fierce hostility to corruption and an inability to be intimidated by political threats. By the time he was drafted to run for president on the Democratic ticket, Cleveland was so renowned for his rectitude in public office that he was nicknamed "Grover the Good."
Then as now, newspapers endorsed (and opposed) political candidates, and it was during the 1884 presidential campaign that what I regard as the finest newspaper endorsement in US political history was published. It appeared in Joseph Pulitzer's New York World, a Democratic-leaning paper, which gave its readers four reasons to send Cleveland to the White House:
"1. He is an honest man. 2. He is an honest man. 3. He is an honest man. 4. He is an honest man."
All I want in this presidential season is a candidate of whom the same can be said.
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What I Wrote Then
25 years ago on the op-ed page
From "Turn limits turncoats" Jan. 21, 1999:
Marty Meehan, a lean and hungry Massachusetts congressman, is caught in a painful dilemma. He has to decide which means more to him — his word or his ambition.
When he ran for the House of Representatives in 1992, Meehan made an ironclad promise to serve no more than four terms. "We should use the liberation of term limits to smash open our gridlocked yet out-of-control Congress," he said. It was a quite a pledge, particularly for a Massachusetts Democrat, and it helped propel Meehan to a dramatic primary victory over the four-term incumbent, Chester Atkins.
Now Meehan is a four-term incumbent himself, and he doesn't want to leave.
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The Last Line
"That will be a great day, that will be a great tomorrow. In the words of the Scripture, to speak symbolically, that will be the day when the morning stars will sing together and the sons of God will shout for joy." — Martin Luther King Jr., "The Other America" (April 14 1967)
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(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe).
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