Plane Crashes Stoke Psyche’s Deepest Fears
Planes aren’t supposed to fall out of the sky.
When they do, they send a collective shudder through those of us on the ground. The unanswered questions can transfix the nation for days.
What’s in the black box? Where are the bodies? What was it like on that tumbling, cartwheeling plane?
“It has a hypnotic pull,” said Robert R. Butterworth, a Los Angeles psychologist who specializes in easing trauma and disaster. “Everyone thinks of themselves on that plane.”
Responses to an airline crash are more visceral than in other disasters, experts said. This is because many of us are deeply ambivalent about--and more than slightly afraid of--flying.
“Plane crashes unleash one of the resident nightmares in our brain,” said Joan Deppa, principal author of “The Media and Disasters: Pan Am 103.” “We know it can happen to us.”
The riveting mix of crash fear and fascination, psychologists say, stems largely from primal fears about the supremely unnatural act of flying in thin metal tubes far above our natural habitat.
“Evolution did not prepare us for this,” Butterworth said.
Spectacular plane disasters have their own morbid pull--as high attendance at air shows attests. Fiery crashes fulfill a darker need: an innate hunger for sensation, thrill and danger.
As a species, psychologists said, we evolved to be acutely tuned to dangers such as stalking tigers. In our relatively safe and sometimes mundane modern lives, we’re still tuned for danger, and seek it in tales of the Titanic, books about icy deaths on Everest or rides on today’s increasingly terrifying roller coasters.
“Whether it’s video games or a fascination with the macabre and death, people seek anything that brings adrenaline,” said Lilli Friedland, a Los Angeles psychologist and member of the American Psychological Assn.’s national disaster response team.
Feelings of Helplessness
Our fears have evolved as quickly as our forms of transportation. During the 19th century, said Boston University anthropologist Thomas Barfield, newfangled trains seemed exceedingly fast and frightening, and train wrecks were the fascination of the day. Today, those iron horses seem tame. “There’s a sense you can jump out,” Butterworth said.
Not so in a plane. “We’ve all felt this sense of unease, this mystical sense of being up in the air--silent, weightless and helpless,” said Michael Berlin, an associate professor at the Boston University School of Journalism and an expert on how the media cover disasters.
That persistent helplessness--the idea of dozens of defenseless people strapped into chairs awaiting their doom--is what makes thinking about the final moments of this week’s Alaska Airlines crash so poignant.
“Everyone’s fear is about those last 10 minutes. Those are the most fascinating. People want to know if [the victims] died instantly,” Butterworth said.
Frequent fliers often are particularly riveted by technical details of a crash. Just hours after Alaska Airlines Flight 261 went down Monday, obscure aviation terms like horizontal stabilizer had become common parlance.
We hunger for a technical explanation of a crash, Deppa said, so we can assure ourselves that our next flight will be safe.
“I watch to see what the cause was. I want to know whether it’s mechanical or pilot error,” said Harry Parker, a computer consultant from Tulsa who flies through Los Angeles International Airport once a week. An incident due to negligence, he said, would cause him to change airlines.
We know, of course, that huge, heavy metal planes are perfectly capable of cruising through the air. Deep down, though, it all seems so unlikely.
“I always find it a little magical that you can get this great, whacking big airplane off the ground,” Deppa said. “I know a little about the physics of it, but I still don’t believe it.”
If we were rational creatures, said USC sociologist Barry Glassner, we would be far more frightened of our cars. More people are killed on U.S. highways each year (more than 40,000) than have been killed in domestic plane crashes throughout the entire history of aviation (fewer than 14,000).
“The odds of your dying on the way to the airport are greater than the odds of dying on the plane trip,” said Glassner, author of “The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things.”
Then why are planes so much more frightening than cars? Because we have no control--no steering wheel, no brake--only a thin seat belt, a laminated emergency instruction card and our own blind faith.
“Getting in an airplane,” Deppa said, “means you are essentially turning over your life to someone else.”
Some of the most gripping air disasters have been those where passengers suffered the longest before crashing: In a 1989 United Airlines crash in Sioux City, Iowa, passengers had 44 minutes to pray, write letters and compose wills after an engine failed. When the DC-10 crashed, 114 were killed.
In February of that year, the fuselage of a United flight traveling between Honolulu and Auckland, New Zealand, ripped open 17 minutes after takeoff at 22,000 feet. Nine passengers were sucked out of the plane and lost to the sea. For the next 24 minutes and 100 miles, the remaining 328 passengers waited--terrified and helpless--as the pilot nursed the maimed 747 back to land. “I knew I was dead four different ways,” passenger Jeff Higginbotham told a reporter at the time.
While such scenes are almost too disturbing to imagine, they have the same peculiar, voyeuristic pull of horror movies. “There’s a morbid fascination,” said Paul Doughty, an anthropologist who recently retired from the University of Florida.
For some, terrible events inspire more drastic action. Doughty, whose fieldwork on migration patterns of people in South America has given him a front-row seat to major earthquakes in Peru and Guatemala, said both events drew “disaster junkies” who went to considerable trouble to visit the scene. “You have to make an effort to get there, but people do,” he said.
“I’m not sure why people have this macabre fascination with death and dying,” said P. Willey, a forensic anthropologist at Cal State Chico, whose job requires the close examination of human bones and other remains. “It’s one of those things that’s somewhat taboo or off-limits in our society.”
The impulse to rubberneck at freeway accidents and hover near disaster seems timeless. Even the Roman poet Lucretius wrote: “It is pleasant, when the sea runs high, to view the land from the distress of another.”
Crashes Intensify Fear of Flying
A major air crash can intensify--and justify--the latent fear of flying so many harbor. A Newsweek poll of 752 adults commissioned after the October crash of EgyptAir 990 showed 50% are afraid of flying--the highest percentage in more than a decade.
A fresh crash may be hardest on those who have suffered losses in previous accidents.
“As soon as I hear of a crash, I’m usually in tears. It takes me right back to how I felt when Dad was killed,” said Andrea Waas, who founded Wings of Light, a Phoenix-based support group (www.wingsoflight.org) for those who lose loved ones to air crashes. “It opens old wounds,” said Waas, whose father, Willis, was killed in a 1987 crash.
But many people who have no direct connection to the accident will obsess about a crash--and that has its own costs, said Diana Fairechild, a former flight attendant and author of “Jet Smarter: The Air Traveler’s RX.” “You think about it so much, it depletes mental and physical energy,” she said.
Many travelers departing from LAX on Thursday, even as they were paging through news accounts of Monday’s crash, said that although it was on their minds, it was not affecting their travel plans. Some Alaska Airlines passengers said they felt even safer than normal because they doubted a second plane from the same airline would crash.
“It comes down to necessity,” said Dave Trowbridge, a labor union representative from Altadena who boarded a plane bound for Honolulu at LAX Thursday afternoon for a business meeting. “I have to go to Hawaii and there’s no other way to get there.”
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Times staff writer Ann L. Kim contributed to this story.
