One in ninety million. That's your odds of dying in a plane crash. Even if you are in a plane crash, your chance of survival is 95.7%.
Yet many people believe "if this plane goes down, we're all dead and there's nothing we can do about it."
Why do people perceive the danger to be so great? Barnett studied the front page of The New York Times and found the answer. Page-one coverage of airplane accidents was sixty times greater than reporting on HIV/AIDs; fifteen hundred times greater than auto hazards; and six thousand times greater than cancer, the second leading killer in America after heart disease.
Ben Sherwood explains in The Great Plane Crash Myth.
One dangerous consequence of the Myth of Hopelessness is that when people believe there’s nothing they can do to save themselves, they put themselves in even greater peril.
The crew of the US Airways Flight 1549 behaved quite differently
'Deliberate calm' guided crew
In recent years, neuroscientists have been able to see what happens inside the brain when people, like Sullenberger, are forced to make decisions under pressure. Though the typical assumption is that some people don't feel fear -- that they are somehow less scared than the rest of us -- that assumption turns out to be false. The fear circuits in the brain, such as the amygdala, generate their response automatically; it's almost certain that everyone on board Flight 1549 was terrified.
What, then, allows people like Sullenberger to make effective decisions in harrowing circumstances? How do they keep their fear from turning into panic? Scientists have found that the crucial variable is the ability to balance visceral emotions against a more rational and deliberate thought process, which is centered in the prefrontal cortex. This balancing act is known as metacognition -- a sort of thinking about thinking.
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Pilots have a different name for this skill: They call it "deliberate calm," because staying calm under fraught circumstances requires both conscious effort and regular practice.
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The important lesson of US Airways Flight 1549, however, is that no matter how difficult or unprecedented the problem, we have the ability to look past our primal emotions and carefully think about how we need to think. Metacognition allows a person to remain calm when every bone in his body is telling him to panic. It
It's definitely the "practice" at the heart of his performance. Doubtless he has practiced many times in simulators - crash situations. While this is not the real thing, if we look at flying in the same way we look at driving, regular practice means you don't have to concentrate on non-essentials during an emergency. This would free up the brain to work on other necessary items - such as where to land.
I also believe (after talking to a psychologist when my son took the Stanford-Binet test and tested out at the very top of the visual tests) it's a very real possibility Mr. Sullenberger is "visually gifted". As it was explained to me: visually gifted people have the ability to take in everything around them with one single glance and then know exactly what to do. Because eyesight works so much faster than other senses, those who are visually gifted can process the incoming data far faster than the average person.
As for everyone believing that they will die if a plane crashes... that's the easiest of the lot. How much publicity does a "non-fatal" crash get as opposed to a fatal one? The only reason this crash has received such attention was the spectacular type of landing. In other words "it's a story". Most non-fatal "crash landings" are not interesting enough to warrant more than a blurb on the news, while those claiming lives are hyped to the extreme. For those who only pay cursory attention to the news, it seems as though all crash landing are fatal.
Posted by: Teresa at January 21, 2009 9:33 PM