PLANE CRASHES AND PUBLiC PoLiCy. A dramatic rise in air travel has caused problems, but airline safety is not among them. In 1990 there were nearly 7
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1chapter1Plane Crashes andPublic PolicyDuring the week of July 14, 1996, a drunk driver in Indi-ana died when his car went off the road.1 A truck driver in Ohio died when he lost control of his big rig.2 Two sisters and two children were killed in a crash en route to a vacation Bible school.3 That week 842 people died in motor vehicle accidents, yet none of the accidents was covered bythe national media.4 That same week 230 people lost their lives when Trans World Airlines flight 800 exploded just after takeoff from JFK In- ternational Airport and crashed into the Atlantic Ocean. Yet the crash of the airliner, not highway deaths, became the year™s top press story, asplane crashes receive media coverage disproportionate to their death toll.5Understanding how plane crashes affect airline transportation policy isthe focus of this book.The terror attacks of September 11, 2001, led Jane Garvey, the head of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), to order the first-ever nationalground stop, which effectively shuts down the domestic aviation system.Aviation security rose to the top of the transportation policy agenda. De- spite all the tumult, however, one feature of air travel did not change: It remained an extremely safe way to travel. Fewer than 14,000 individualshave perished in U.S. airline disasters between the beginning of public aviation and the year 2000.6 Nearly three times as many people lose their lives in automobile accidents every year. Yet a Gallup poll commissionedby the Air Transport Association indicates that a plurality of the public views automobiles as the safest mode of transportation.7
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2plane crashes and public policy A dramatic rise in air travel has caused problems, but airline safety is not among them. In 1990 there were nearly 7 million departures. In 1999 that number was nearly 9 million.8 At the same time, the infrastructure of the national aviation system is crumbling: Air traffic control systems areoutmoded, delays have skyrocketed (up 33 percent in the 1990s), and service complaints have risen.9 Although these problems receive attention from policymakers and the press, the airlines are often able to containthem by promising to make changes voluntarily. Plane crashes are different. When a crash occurs on American soil, themass media, the public, and the government focus on it, sometimes, per-haps, out of proportion to its importance. In the era of the twenty-four- hour news cycle, media coverage is immediate and continuous as is mediaspeculation regarding the cause of the crash. Government teams rush toinvestigate, elected officials offer condolences and promise to find the cause, and sometimes legislation is quickly introduced.Plane crashes capture our attention because they bring to the fore a factabout flying that is often unexpressed: Once the cabin door closes, passen- gers are at the mercy of the crew and the equipment. By nature, humans are loath to relinquish control over their fate, but that is precisely whattravelers do each time they fly. As a consequence, faith in the air travel system is contingent on the public learning the reason a plane crashed. If there is an explanation, then there presumably is a way to prevent futureincidents of a similar nature. Randomness is not a sufficient explanation, even if it is the only one available. fiIn such a culture,fl write Eleanor Singer and Phyllis Endreny in Reporting on Risk, fithe ultimate horror is adisaster without an explanation, an essentially random event.fl10The Airline Industry at a GlanceIn March 1915 the Benoist Company began the first regularly scheduledpassenger airline in the United States, offering travel between Saint Peters- burg and Tampa, Florida. Less than one year later, the government formedthe National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics to support aviationresearch and assist this nascent industry.11 In May 1926 President Coolidge signed the Air Commerce Act into law, and the government entered into aregulatory partnership with the airline industry.12Before 1978 the federal Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) regulated sched-ules and fares: An airline could not initiate a new route or change fares
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plane crashes and public policy3 without approval from the CAB. As the industry grew, such a regulatoryapparatus became unwieldy. The last chairman of the CAB, Alfred Kahn, did the unthinkable in Washington: He called for the elimination of hisown agency (which was accomplished with the passage of the 1978 Air-line Deregulation Act).13 Suddenly, the fundamentals of air travel changed. The hub-and-spoke system, pioneered by Delta Airlines, became the in-dustry standard.14 Under this system, airlines use large airports as hubs for flights to a multitude of locations, allowing potentially unprofitable routes to be viable. For instance, the market for a flight from Rochester, N.Y., toSan Antonio, Texas, is not very large. However, with the hub-and-spoke system, an airline can offer a flight from Rochester to Chicago, a United Airlines and American Airlines hub with connections to hundreds of cit-ies, including San Antonio. One drawback of the hub-and-spoke system is that it has led to domination of certain airports by one or two airlines, leading to high ticket prices when the hub is the final destination.15Deregulation also spawned no-frills airlines, which often eschew theuse of hubs and emphasize point-to-point travel. The most notable ex- ample is Southwest Airlines, formed in 1971 to handle intrastate travel inTexas.16 Southwest has since become a major player by expanding at smaller airports rather than at hub airports controlled by the major airlines. It is one of the few airlines to weather the recent economic downturns of theindustry, and competitors now routinely match Southwest™s fares on cer-tain routes.In general, deregulation is lauded for producing lower fares and moreoptions for air travelers. To be sure, there have been calls for reregulation,most notably in 1989, when Senators Howard Metzenbaum (D-Ohio) and Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) introduced S. 1854, known as the AirlineReregulation Act. The bill never left committee, and most observers agreethat the days of government control of airline routes and fares have passed. The economists Steven Morrison and Clifford Winston find that faresdropped 22 percent as a consequence of deregulation.17 Air travel is there- fore now open to more travelers than it was in the 1970s. In 1978 about 25 percent of all Americans took a flight; this measure reached nearly40 percent in 1997; in 1978 around 65 percent had ever flown on a com-mercial airliner, reaching 80 percent by 1997.18The effect of deregulation on airline safety is more complicated. Mosteconomists conclude that airline safety has been enhanced or at the veryleast been unaffected by the change.19 But the safety benefits of a deregu- lated marketplace are not immediately obvious. First, when rates and routes
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4plane crashes and public policy were heavily regulated, an airline ™s competitive edge was through service, which implicitly includes safety.20 In a deregulated marketplace, however, an airline™s competitive advantage comes in large measure from conve-nience and price. Second, the rise of low-cost airlines like Southwest hasincreased pressure on major airlines to cut costs, some of which may af- fect safety. Third, the hub-and-spoke system, which has been generallyadopted under deregulation, produces a greater number of stops for eachpassenger, and accidents occur most often during takeoffs and landings.21Counterbalancing these negatives is the desire of airlines, like most cor-porations, to protect their brand. Also, lower prices may induce individu-als to shift from highway to airline travel, which is safer for longer dis- tances. An airline can weather a single plane crash, but if its planes fall outof the sky regularly or if there is a perception that the airline is unsafe, the company or its management is in dire straits. Even though the effect of a crash on the bottom line is often negligible, the perception that an airlineis dangerous can be fatal, and there can be a contagion effect. For in-stance, after the crash of low-cost carrier ValuJet™s flight 592, all low-costairlines suffered massive declines in their stock, while major carriers (in-cluding Southwest) saw a slight increase.22Overall, crashes have been infrequent since deregulation.23 In 1993, 1998, and 2002 there were no deaths on any major domestic carriers. Yetthere is a continual tension between optimal levels of safety and the viewthat airline travel should be perfectly safe. The Department of Transpor- tation (DOT) and the FAA have both set a goal of zero accidents, a goalthat can be met only by grounding all planes.24 In other words, this objec- tive is unrealistic. Plane crashes are already rare, so the marginal cost of saving an additional life is extremely high.25 The median cost for every life-year saved by an FAA regulation is estimated at $23,000, which isremarkably low.26 By way of comparison, the Environmental Protection Agency imposes an average $7.6 million for every life-year saved. If regu-lations are imposed to address minor risks of air travel, the marginal costof saving a life will skyrocket. Airlines therefore tangle with the FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) over safety procedures,with the airlines trying to balance safety with other considerations, suchas profit. Meanwhile, the NTSB, which has no power to mandate safety measures, is concerned only with learning the causes of crashes and sug-gesting reforms. Implementation of suggestions falls to the FAA, which until recently had a dual mandate to both promote airlines and regulate their activity.27
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plane crashes and public policy5 Although flying is as safe as or safer than it has ever been, there arecalls for further regulations. These calls often ignore the fact that airlines and airplane manufacturers already have an incentive to keep their planessafe, if only for purely economic reasons. The economist Nancy Rose writes,fiThis national preoccupation with airline safety may provide the ultimateexplanation for the high safety standards maintained by the U.S. carriers and the immense improvements in air safety over time.fl28 And the soci- ologist Charles Perrow writes,The aircraft and airlines industries are uniquely favored to supportsafety efforts. Profits are tied to safety; the victims are neither hid- den, random, nor delayed and can include influential members ofthe industry and Congress; a vigorous union fights the industry™stemptation to call fioperator errorfl and instead looks for vendor and management errors; a remarkable voluntary reporting systemexists, experience is extensive, and the repetitive cycle of takeoffs,cruising, and landing promotes rapid training, precise experience with failures, and trials with errors for new designs and conditions.29The Flight Safety Foundation, which publishes a newsletter for airline ex- ecutives, notes that fipoor safety performance equals poor financial per-formance.fl30 The evidence for this claim is not ironclad, but as long as airline executives view safety as an important component of their busi-ness, airlines are likely to select the optimal level of safety. It is doubtful, though, that airlines will ever be allowed to make the cost-benefit tradeoffs inherent in safety regulation without some government oversight. Theremay be some justification for this: Deregulation has increased the com- petitiveness of the industry but has also led to a challenging business envi-ronment (which has only been exacerbated by the events of September11). The news media influence how the public views political issues, and it helps the public determine what issues are important and evaluate howpolitical officials are managing conflict. The political scientist BernardCohen, echoing many others, says that the press fimay not be successful intelling the public what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling itsreaders what to think about.fl31The journalist Roger Lowenstein terms the airlines fiflying utilitiesflbecause of their high fixed capital costs. For example, a new plane cancost in excess of $100 million. This is exacerbated by high labor costs.These factors undoubtedly contributed to the 2002 bankruptcy filings by U.S. Airways and United Airlines. Overall airline financial performance
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6plane crashes and public policy reflects these struggles. From 1995 to 1999, the most profitable five-yearperiod in the industry, major companies made three and a half cents on every dollar; whereas most profitable businesses averaged six cents on thedollar. In the 1990s the return was less than a penny for every dollarearned.32 Since deregulation the airlines have averaged a 0.3 percent profit margin, or an average annual profit of $255 million.33Profitability in the airline industry is related to what is known as a loadfactor, or the percentage of seats filled on an airline™s flights by payingpassengers. The average load factor level has steadily increased since de-regulation, rising from 61 percent in 1978 to 72 percent in 2002.34 The breakeven load factor, the point at which airlines make zero profit, has also increased. The breakeven load factor rose to a record 81 percent in 2002.35 This figure is even higher for some airlines. In the fourth quarterof 2001, for instance, the breakeven load factor for United Airlines was 96 percent and for American Airlines was around 85 percent.36 While the airline industry was profitable in each year from 1995 through 2000, thetrend reversed in 2001 and continued in 2002. The industry as a whole can expect to be profitable again in 2004, according to the Air TransportAssociation.37The one ray of light in this otherwise bleak picture is Southwest Air-lines, the only carrier to consistently return profits to shareholders by dra-matically expanding its routes and flights over time. To minimize costs,on point-to-point routes the carrier uses one type of plane and one passen- ger class. Pilots fly more hours and planes remain on the ground for shorterperiods of time than is true for the major carriers. Union problems areminimized by means of annual cash payments in a profit-sharing arrange- ment.38 Other airlines are, however, unlikely to match the Southwest model. Disaster StoriesSome scholars argue that there are very few news story formats and thatonly the issues and the names change. Gaye Tuchman writes: fiReports ofnews events are storiesŠno more, but no less. . . . Reporters discoverevents . . . (or are presented with events) in which they can locate themesand conflicts of a particular society. These events get retold as essentiallythe same story from year to year and even from decade to decade.fl39 To understand why plane crashes receive so much media attention, it is im-portant to view a plane crash as a political event with an intrinsic humaninterest angle.
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8plane crashes and public policy They are normally identified as heroes, even though many feel uncomfort-able with the designation.ŠCause. Coverage inevitably turns to who or what caused the disas-ter. The media need a focus of responsibility. This interplay between vic-tims and causes is sometimes referred to as the hero-villain syndrome. While those who survived are portrayed positively, those who might havecontributed to the accidents are seen in negative terms. Obviously, somedisasters have no human agent, if the cause is natural, and weather or earthquakes do not make convincing villains. In such situations, the onlynegative portrayal might be of the person who should have seen the eventcoming and taken more adequate preparations to avoid it. If an accident was caused by an unknown human, such as a camper who accidentallycaused a forest fire, he or she is likely to be forgotten. But if the culpableperson is a prominent player in the drama (for example, the captain of an oil tanker or a nuclear plant official), attention tends to last longer. Themore mystery surrounding the cause, the more attention the press willgive to a disaster.ŠCure. The final focus of disaster stories is the reaction of governmentagencies. Oftentimes this takes the form of public hearings followed byformal actions. Answers to the following questions normally attract me- dia coverage: Are certain people to blame? Have regulations or laws beenchanged to avoid such calamities in the future? Have certain geographicalareas or groups of people been given government funds to prepare for such events in the future? The cure phase may last from a few weeks toseveral years. Proposals for cures will often be cosmetic and provide ques-tionable fisolutionsfl to intractable problems. The Role of ExpertsAirline crashes place specific safety issues on the government agenda, with the media acting as an integral player in this process. Journalistsusually lack the credentials to report on plane crashes with only their own expertise, and they rely on experts in meteorology, geology, chem-istry, biology, or engineering to help them translate the story™s techno-logical or scientific language. The media encourage the view that ex- perts have consensual views and do not consider that the opinions oftheir own experts often reflect a particular perspective. The credentialsof many of these experts are questionable, and often their speculation
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plane crashes and public policy9 spreads misinformation. Jim Hall, the former National TransportationSafety Board chairman, says,For me, the biggest disappointment when I review press coverage isthe cavalier way some news outlets give their air time away to people who really don™t know what they™re talking about. You™ve all seenexamples of this. Where once reporters would try to verify storiesbefore putting them on the air, now we constantly hear what can only be called rumors being spread by what are considered legiti-mate broadcasters. How many times have you heard a reporter say,fiThis isn™t verified but . . . fl or fiA so-far-unsubstantiated reportsays. . . .fl If it isn ™t verified, if it isn™t substantiated, why are theybroadcasting it?fl43Story FramesSlogans, as well as verbal or visual images, anchor a story, but they can bemanipulated to give false impressions. E. L. Quarantelli studied a varietyof disasters and concludes that media reports of natural disasters fido notreflect reality but are a matter of social construction.fl44 Many reporters, for example, prefer the term toxic dump to nuclear disposal facility.45Conrad Smith investigated the television and print coverage of three di-sasters: the earthquake in Oakland in 1989, the forest fires in YellowstonePark in 1988, and the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989.46 In each case the coverage promulgated a misconception. Although the earthquake damagewas centered in Oakland, reporters relied on images of San Francisco and its 1906 quake to anchor their stories. The forest fire coverage stressed Yellowstone Park as the country™s premier pristine national park untouchedby external forces and gave the impression that such fires were less fre-quent than is actually the case. The Exxon Valdez case focused on dying, oil-covered animals, blackened beaches, and Alaska as the last frontier.The prominent symbols were fipowerful natural forces, bumbling bureau-crats, anthropomorphized fires, and threatened forest creatures.fl47Plane crashes are tailor-made for such stories, having all the necessaryelements: death, destruction, mystery, conflict, human interest, and trag-edy. When a plane filled with German tourists crashed off the coast of the Dominican Republic in 1996, killing all 189 aboard, at least ten majornewspapers referred to the crash site as fishark-infestedfl waters. 48 After the crash of ValuJet flight 592 into the Florida Everglades, reporters said
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10plane crashes and public policy that the plane had landed in fimurkyfl waters fiinfestedfl with crocodiles and snakes.49 Plane crashes fit well into Entman ™s framework, being easilysimplified, personalized, and symbolized. fiThe way some journalists seeit,fl according to Barry Glassner, fiair safety objectively deserves a highlevel of coverage, not just on account of the drama surrounding plane crashes but because plane wrecks produce lasting effects on people™s psy-ches and on the U.S. economy.fl50 The long-term economic effect of a plane crash is actually not as large as journalists believe; nonetheless, the economic effect of a crash is a media focus.Public Perception and Policy ResponsesAirline safety is a political issue due to public anxiety, widespread media coverage, and politicians™ attraction to high-visibility concerns, such as crashes. Days after TWA flight 800 crashed in 1996, a CBS News pollshowed that 83 percent of regular fliers believed that airlines and govern- ment should spend more money on airline safety even if it meant higherticket prices.51 In a 1998 Kaiser Family Foundation poll, 65 percent of Americans believed that a lot of regulation was necessary, 23 percent be- lieved that some was justified, and only 10 percent believed that little ornone was required.52 And in a 1999 Gallup poll 55 percent of Americans had fisomewhat lessfl or fimuch lessfl confidence in airline safety com- pared with a few years before.53 Clearly, an elected official can benefit by promoting safety, especially since airlines (and ultimately customers) bearthe costs of additional regulation.Even if statistics indicate that air travel is extremely safe, each planecrash looms large since news stories focus on them out of proportion totheir death tolls. In general, the media tend to exaggerate certain risks. For example, a study in the American Journal of Public Health shows that news sources overemphasize deaths from drug use, car accidents, and toxicagents.54 In a study examining plane crashes, the aviation expert Arnold Barnett shows that, in 1988Œ89, the New York Times gave 8,000 times more coverage (in terms of deaths per thousand people) to plane crashesthan to cancer.55 Further, people tend to overestimate the number of deaths from rare events and to underestimate the number of deaths from com-mon events.56 They also perceive links between rare events that occur close in time, even if none exists, so that they can avoid accepting that random- ness is to blame.57 Since airline crashes are so unusual, their occurrence is
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plane crashes and public policy11 cause for concern and airline safety hence occupies the agenda. ThomasBirkland argues, fiThe rarity or novelty of the event is important because run-of-the-mill events are unlikely to gain focal power because of theircommonness.fl58 When an airline crash occurs, government officials are quick to seek out a cause, thereby calming fears. If equipment failure is determined to be a contributory factor, then there may be debate aboutwhat action is required to ensure that the same problem does not recur.On a larger scale, a crash reminds policymakers and the public that airline travel carries some risk. According to a RAND study conducted for theNTSB, the crashes of TWA flight 800 and ValuJet flight 592 fishook thefoundation of the aviation community. The traveling public was fright- ened, and media pundits questioned the . . . safety of domestic airlineoperations.fl59 A single mishap often provides very little information about the overall safety of the airline industry. Precisely because they occur with such low frequency, crashes can be thought of as nearly random eventsthat are bound to occur. Airline crashes remind the public and policymakersthat airline safety is an issue of interest. Crashes act as triggering events, directing attention to the issue.Regulatory changes with the aim of improving airline safety are oftenprompted by plane crashes, which may be misleading indicators of the safety of air travel. Plane crashes draw attention to airline safety, newsstories of the crashes publicize the issue, the public then perceives it as amajor problem, and political actors address this concern by means of new policy proposals. As we demonstrate in the next few chapters, the multi-plicity of actors involved in air safetyŠall of whom come to the table withdifferent agendasŠmakes public policy in this area disconnected and fairlychaotic. Airplanes are complex pieces of machinery, and a catastrophicfailure may be, after all is said and done, a random event. The desire to find the smoking gun may divert resources and attention from more effec- tive ways of ensuring safety in the skies.The Rest of the BookIn the remainder of this book we examine the way plane crashes affect public policy. In chapter 2 the players in airline safety are identified, as is the sequence of the events that follow a plane crash. Chapter 3 pro-vides statistics on airline safety, explains the high level of media atten- tion to plane crashes, and notes the way crashes affect public policy. In
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