Gary Brown: Too many chances in the unfriendly skies

If you are flying and, hypothetically speaking, a wheel falls off or perhaps an engine catches on fire or maybe a wing starts to fall apart, so you have to make an emergency landing at the nearest airport, do you:

What to know about runway incursions: Do fatal plane crashes happen in the US?

A. Scream like a baby, shake your companion's shoulders and claim, "I knew this would happen if you didn't get the flight accident insurance."

B. Pray and promise God all sorts of stuff in return for a soft landing.

C. Ask the flight attendant for another ginger ale, but this time with a large amount of whiskey in it – or maybe just the whiskey.

D. Finish reading your in-flight magazine, thank the crew as you exit, and say "bye-bye now" as if nothing happened, then run to the nearest rental car agency so you can finish your trip on the road.

E. Transfer planes and continue on, confident that you survived an "in-flight mishap," so the odds are good that you are safe and it's somebody else's plane that is actually going to crash.

'Ground control, we have a problem'

Why do airline officials and then media outlets call air emergencies mere mishaps? Some say they're only in-air incidents. Either term is understating the situation. Disagreements over who gets the armrest are incidents. People on the plane are panicking.

When flames are seen exiting an engine with more intensity than the fire in your backyard barbecue when the burger grease hits the coals, it is not merely a mishap.

For example, should a plane suddenly taxi off a runway and end up on the grass, it is more than just an inconvenient occurrence to passengers inside.

If a tire falls off an airliner shortly after take-off and hits cars in the airport parking lot, it's hardly just a distraction to passengers in the plane or the drivers of the cars.

When an emergency door flies off and air tries to suck out passengers sitting next to it, that's not to be considered only an unfortunate problem to the people holding on to their fold-down trays for dear life.

And, if an aircraft's wing begins to fall apart during a flight, passengers in window seats see more than an embarrassing occurrence to be explained at the next airline board meeting.

For sure, when a passenger plane plunges in mid-air, causing unbelted passengers to tumble through the cabin and sending many of them to the hospital with broken bones and other injuries, it goes far beyond what a press release refers to as a technical event.

It is a nightmare, one that if your screaming happened at night would cause concerned parents or worried spouses to rush to your side and ask you if you are all right in anxious tones.

Flying still safe for travel

All that having been said, I'm still going to fly, as often as I need to take to the air.

At a time in airline history when passenger planes almost fly themselves, I'd probably even overlook the pilot who looked really, really tired getting on the plane.

As airline officials note, things that cause passengers to freak out in their seats – lumping economy, business and first-class passengers into the same prayer group despite their ticket prices – happen rarely.

And one major TV news network reported that data shows "flying has rarely been safter" than it is now, even though "it may seem like mishaps involving planes have been growing in frequency."

The recent spate of "mishaps" actually is to our advantage. I imagine the leaders of jet manufacturers have issued memorandums to their workers saying such things as "tighten bolts twice" and airline maintenance workers have been ordered to repair planes with something more substantial than duct tape and a really good glue.

Of course, I'm a guy who for work and pleasure has ridden in that little basket of a hot air balloon, flown in a glider that I hoped would glide better than one of those balsa wood hand-thrown planes, trusted flying in an experimental plane that a guy I just met had built, actually piloted one of those "parachute over a go-cart" paraplanes, experienced a barrel roll in a biplane, ridden in a helicopter when the side door was missing, taken a flight in a cargo plane that left the back hatch open, and parachute jumped from a perfectly good airplane that wasn't showing any signs of going down.

So, I might not value my life as much as you'd like for me to be your role model.

Reach Gary at gary.brown.rep@gmail.com. On "X" (Formerly Twitter): @gbrownREP.

This article originally appeared on The Alliance Review: Gary Brown asks if we take chances in today's unfriendly skies