Something Serious: Airplane Safety
Accidents hardly ever happen. Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book The Black Swan, points out that terrible incidents (like planes being forced down because of flocks of birds getting caught in the engines) hardly ever happen, but he points out the discussion about such incidents raises the fear factor because we think only of the horrible accident and not of all the thousands and thousands safe incidents of plane travel.
Today a horrible thing happened when a US Airways Airbus crashed through the frigid sky into the nearly freezing Hudson River. All the people were saved. I don’t know if there were pets, but if there were pets in the hold, maybe they were in serious jeopardy. Would the flight attendants have rescued them? Would they? I’m skeptical. It would take a real hero to do that. Real heroes do emerge, like Black Swans, but they are, after all, Black Swans themselves.
This is why, when traveling with pets, it is really important to be realistic. Pets travel most safely in cabin. Is this unfair to large pets who are not allowed to travel in cabin? Yes, it certainly is. A small pet traveling in cabin can be whisked out of a plane, but one in the hold cannot.
I don’t have an answer to this or anything final to say, but I'm pensive right now about how blithely we hop on planes and how random things (birds who decide to fly east in a flock for some reason???) can cause near tragedies. If Raja couldn’t fly in cabin, I think I’d see much less of the world for sure.
Next post is going to be about our beloved Canada and the “Where’s Raja” contest will be about skiing, but today’s serious accident makes us think and hope that all planes land in safety every time.
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