All over the United States, planes fall from the sky.
Or at least it's what it looks like in recent news. For weeks, mainstream media has been dominated by air disasters. 67 people died in DC, beginning with an air collision on January 29th. This was America's most deadly commercial airline crash fall since 9/11, followed by two more crashes, in which two crashes were killed. A total of 16 people aboard these aircraft. The fourth crash in Toronto on a Minneapolis US airline injured 18 people and ended with a dramatic image of a plane on the runway.
Just as they did right whenever a plane crashed in recent memory, analysts competed to uncover the structural causes of these horrifying tragedies. Supporters and politicians have likewise created their structural conditions and correctly demanded accountability from powerful decision makers who put the flying masses at risk.
But so far, it seems that accountability hasn't come, and the crash hasn't stopped.
Our furious response to deaths from airplane crashes in the US in the US has long been postponed as a shining counter-example of shrugs dealing with the tragedy of transport on the ground. .
For example, advocacy groups like Transportation for America recently compared annual pedestrian deaths to “three or more Boeing 737s full of people falling from the sky for a year each month.” Massacres from the aviation industry or its regulatory authorities. The campaign to stop using the term “car accident” points out that an alternative to transportation is “no accidents on planes.”
Languages are not the only standards for these doubles. They also reflect what we are doing to save lives in future disasters. About 800 people died on board in crashes on airlines involving US airlines between 2002 and 2022, two of which have occurred on large commercial airlines since 2010. It's there. plane. )
Meanwhile, in 2010 alone, more than 855,000 people have been killed in car accidents in the first few years since 9/11.
That disparity is surprising, even considering that half of Americans didn't even step into planes last year, and that the average US resident climbed the car about four times a day. It's even more surprising compared to European countries where car accident mortality is part of us and is rapidly downward. And while many people rely on highly trained pilots in the automobile-centric America, whether or not everyone over the age of 15 is eligible to do so, It claims it is not fully explained by the fact that it is functionally necessary for everyone over the age of age.
“Society expects absolute safety in air travel,” Marina Borotnikova wrote for VOX in 2023. crash.
But in the last few weeks I have found myself looking for an ominous reversal of that question. Are you watching the dawn of an era in which America can't handle planes like cars and deal with the structural causes of those disasters?
And, if so, what do you say about how our collective attitudes towards transport violence are beginning to change? And what does that mean for the next chapter of the road safety movement?
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To be clear, I don't think the US is still popping out of Overton's windows.
Early theories about the causes of recent plane crashes are diverse, and the NTSB only brings preliminary findings to some, but most Americans still have the ability to remain unsatisfied with the pilots and the like. It seems they intuitively understand that it's not just because of some fateful mistakes that air traffic controllers have made. Even when human error plays a role. Certainly, it appears that no one is satisfied with amortizing recent tragedy as an individual crime or an inevitable accident, as we do with car accidents every day.
Americans are still demanding system-level solutions to keep planes in the air. They still want multiple layers of safety nets to catch them if they fall, and they constantly repair threads of those nets when their regulators and industry leaders fray I'm hoping for this.
However, all of these safety nets are not equally strong, and our power to strengthen or shred them is not equally distributed.
Various democratic politicians when President Trump made the unfounded claim that former President Joe Biden's “diversity, equity and inclusion” initiative among air traffic controllers blamed the DC crash. By a statement accused of outrageous, sleazy and offensive – he pulled with threads woven deeply into every layer of our collective safety net: the public's trust in the government itself. (Of course, he linked the thread to an inherent bias in the Americans.
When he complied with the statement, weeks later, staff and pilots who were medically safe from fired hundreds of Federal Aviation Administration employees to prevent planes from hitting buildings, construction cranes and windmills. Includes the person responsible for making it possible to fly to Canopy, even if adviser Elon Musk claims that “as far as we know, those who affect safety have not been fired.” He tore a wider hole.
Politicizing the tragedy of transportation, denounces systemic violence by individuals, and even one of the American airspaces, one of the world's safest transport systems, solves it all. By weakening the role, it can be reduced to thread-like traces of old ones. . And if we let the profits of businesses be controlled, the same government that we can all claim to be better can destroy it.
Of course, Vision Zero supporters already know a lot of this. For years we've been staring at the big holes in the road safety net.
But if we are entering a new era where the highest level leaders of government are denounced the net for strangling national progress, even among Air Force tourists, we are history. They have fought primarily to protect them much more vigorously than twins. And low-income travelers who die on the ground – that means we have to change our tactics as movement.
In the area of road safety, it means that more safety nets need to be built at the local and state levels to make up for the lack of federal protection. Money for a destructive highway.
That means we need to create new ways to collect data on who will pass through the crack, without resorting to competing state equipment to erase that critical work.
But most of all, building a safe system means accepting that it's not just about building bike lanes, writing speeding tickets, or hiring pilots and air traffic controllers. It is to name a vast, overlapping system of power that is supposed to protect us all from violent death, identify who is responsible for maintaining them, and demand better when it fails. is. It's a thread woven into the whole of our transport safety culture, in the air and into the ground.
