This week I am mainly out of Internet range. In the interim, I share this incredible traffic-safety video from New Zealand, courtesy of charter-sailboat captain and onetime guest blogger here David Ryan.
He writes in response to my previous post, on how I decided not to make a certain flight for our American Futures travels. I said that while people who fly light planes rationalize away the inherent risks, people who don't know about aviation generally don't understand how much of the risk is tied up in the basic go/no-go decision for any given flight.
David Ryan quoted his safety and maritime mentor Mario Vittone, who has flown numerous helicopter-rescue missions for the Coast Guard and has emphasized, similarly, that all of them "could have been avoided before the boat left the dock." Ryan adds:
Here's a brilliant, painful New Zealand driver safety PSA. What I like about it is it takes [a Mario Vittone-style] opening up of the accident timeline, and through a good script and special effects, inserts the prior "decision to have an accident" within the moment of the accident itself.
"Please, I've got my boy in the back …"
I've watched it about 20 times now and it sets my lip a'quivering every time.
I've watched it twice and think that's as much as I can take. It is incredibly powerful, and is one of those short bits of media with the potential to stick in people's minds and thus change their behavior. The U.S. version should prominently feature texting-while-driving, our modern curse.
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The version of this awareness in the tiny portion of my life I spend flying begins with the question, "How would this look in an accident report?" This mainly means the decision to undertake a certain flight—when the weather was deteriorating, when a piece of equipment was giving failure signs, when the destination airport had a tricky or high-altitude location, or when (as two days ago) I would have had to fly an unfamiliar route unusually close to the ground, so as to avoid the A-10s roaring overhead. The accident report is the unsparing narrative by the NTSB or the general pilot community on how an "accident chain" began, and why a pilot did not take one of many opportunities to break the links in that chain. Usually no one thing causes an airplane crash. It's a sequence of things, and avoiding any one of them would have usually prevented the harm.
In the much greater share of our lives that most of us spend driving, we're much less conscious of these accident chains, because our risk perception is so different. We know, on the one hand, that nearly 100 Americans will die today in car accidents. We also know that we're not likely to be one of those. So we come to think of driving as presumptively safe, rather than as potentially catastrophic. I could imagine a campaign based on the New Zealand ad building in more of the "how would this look?" consciousness, especially when it comes to texting.
This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2015/02/on-risk-assessment-in-an-unforgettable-traffic-safety-ad/385454/
