George Rebane

This week’s cancellation of over three thousand flights for safety inspections is a political flap where the FAA is over-reacting to Congress accusing it of being too cozy with the airlines.  What makes it all possible is the established public mentality of codaphobia, now nationwide and growing in direct proportion to the country’s innumeracy rate.

Several years ago I was teaching an upper division/graduate critical thinking course to journalists and media producers called ‘Society and Media’.  In the course we covered ways that the journalistic media select their stories.  One prominent category was to promote and then exploit an unreasonable fear of rare events.  In order to facilitate discussion I named that kind of fear ‘codaphobia’ or literally ‘fear of tails’.

Why tails?  Well the occurrence of events like accidents, major storms, falling off a swing, and getting cancer are random events described by probability distributions such as the famous bell curve.  The events under the hump occur most frequently and the ones to either side out under the tails occur less frequently.  And the ones way out there in the tails are really rare.  Most probability distributions have at least one tail that characterizes how rare certain events described by the distribution are. Codaphobia served our discussions well since it had all the related terms like codaphobe, codaphobic, and so on.  And since then its utility in talking about our society has grown.

Over the last few decades our nation has developed an advanced case of codaphobia, due, I suspect, primarily to our love of tort laws and litigation that absolve us of responsibility.  Suing the bejeezus out of each other has become a cross between a national pastime and a get-rich-quick lottery – for retirement planning winning a good lawsuit beats that iffy social security any day.  We are taught be codaphobic about things ranging scalding coffee in the crotch to our little darlin’ bumping his head on a park teeter-totter. The codaphobes among us demand to be shielded from the psychological trauma of schoolyard name-calling to super-sized hamburgers.  And legions of politicians and lawyers are standing by to legislate and litigate us to whatever level of security we seem to demand.

So now hundreds of thousands of people are mad at the airlines for cancelling flights so that they can check the orientation of retention clips on some wires in the right wheel well of the MD-80 jetliners.  This alleged safety infraction was the quickest way that the FAA could show Rep James Oberstar, Democrat Minnesota, that the agency is serious about maintaining the safety of air travel (with more such demonstration in the coming weeks).   Oberstart, chair of the House Transportation Committee, is not to be put off easily with some simple inspections that shut down a major part of our transportation grid.  He is now threatening the federal takeover of the airline industry.

The mainstream media are not telling the public very much about how idiotic this would be.  The nearby chart shows the relative safety of air travel versus taking your chances in the family bus.  Since airline deregulation in the 1970s every measure of air travel has improved markedly.  This includes air fares, number of flights, cities served, choice of carriers, and, of course, safety. 

The MSM will not tell you that under deregulation air travel safety has improved over eightfold of what it was during the regulated years – 1.984 fatalities per billion miles flown in 1978 versus 0.230 fatalities in 2000-2005 interval (National Transportation Safety Board).  Now suddenly the politicians and bureaucrats along with their MSM trumpets are trying to convince us that it is only the heavy hand of government that keeps the skies friendly – that today the competing airlines suddenly have no more incentive to continue making their flights safer with each passing year.

But on our highways we are selectively codaphiles as we sanguinely accept over 40,000 deaths (and countless more maimings) per year.  Consider what would happen to this death rate were government re-regulation to increase fares to their former levels.  It is estimated that 15% to 20% of people could then no longer afford to fly and would hit the roads instead.  Oberstar and his fellow regulators would then cause another six to eight thousand annual fatalities and, easily, double the number of injuries.  But then, everybody wins.  More regulations, more bureaucrats, more lawsuits, more lawyers, more campaign contributions, … will the celebrations ever stop!?

And this is just one of innumerable areas where our nationally promoted, publicized, and managed codaphobia gives rise to the ongoing ratcheting of our rights.  Innumeracy is a silent plague over the land.