On the Right.(Brief Article)(Column)

Security in the Air

NEW YORK, NOVEMBER 13

It is instructive to catch the emotions on the fly. They do not always yield self-esteem. You furtively hope the bullet will hit the other guy not you. The airplane crashes and instinctively you hope it wasn't a terrorist who did it. But a moment later you start thinking about statistics. Maybe it would be better if it were a terrorist strike. Fleeting thoughts go down memory lane.

How many casualties have come to us through terrorism in the last 20 years of flying? The civilian victims of September 11 can't be counted because, like nuclear bombs, they overwhelm the picture. So you ask, how many planes have met death on account of terrorist activity? The four spectacular planes of September 11. Then you need to go back to the Egyptian plane whose copilot decided to commit suicide and took everyone down to the sea-on the other hand, that wasn't exactly terrorism, was it? But of course the big one was Lockerbie, 270 dead from terrorist action on a Pan American flight headed for the U.S. And one Air India plane off Ireland in 1985.

The thought materializes: If Monday's New York accident comes in as a terrorist episode, that's bad, but less bad than if it is a maintenance act. Because in the world of data, the chances of losing your life in flight on account of terrorist activity are lower than on account of mechanical failure. These are very low, and tend to diminish every year. At last year's rate, you could fly, say, 1 million flights before finding yourself on the plane with the marginal vulnerability. But (the statistics are raging through the mind), you could fly 20 million flights before you'd find yourself on a plane struck down by terrorists.

Besides, you say to yourself, there is a full-blown war going on against terrorist activity. At the level of mechanical safety, it can be said that there is constant concern to avoid critical problems in the air, but that is a steady ...