THERE IS NO REAL REASON TO DISTRUST THE AEROPLANE.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 19272, 8 January 1931, Page 8

THERE IS NO REAL REASON TO DISTRUST THE AEROPLANE.

To-Day's Signed Article

Specially Written for the "‘Star”

By

Gove Hambridge.

Motor-car accidents have very little effect on the average man. The fact that there are many thousands of fatalities the world over in one year does not make him resolve to stay out of motor-cars. But he reads of one aeroplane crash and he registers a mental vow (or his wife registers it for him) that he is not going to trust his life to those contraptions until they are safer.

gOME hold the contrary, but I believe it is foolish to blink the fact that fear—or caution, if you prefer—has been a large factor in keeping people from flying in great numbers. I know many a thinking man who hesitates to fly because he does not believe it is safe. He may overcome hesitancy and take a ten-minutes hop on a Sunday afternoon, but he would not think of boarding a ’plane for a thousand-mile trip. The Nameless Something. I believe that there are two reasons for this. The average man knows the why of the motor-car accident. It is as plain as the nose on your face why Bill Jones was killed at the railway crossing. Bill Jones always was a fool driver anyway. When he knows the cause of a

thing, the average man believes—somewhat fatuously—that the chances are that he himself can avoid it. But in the aeroplane accident there is a Nameless Something he does not understand. He does not see it as the result of an intelligible combination of forces and circumstances, like a brake too suddenly applied to wheels moving on an icy street. Not understanding, he

has a nameless fear. What he needs to overcome this fear is education. For this reason I am against a hush-up policy in aeroplane accidents on the part of the transport companies. The principles of safety in air transport are well understood by the operators, just as they are in railway and bus transport. They should also be understood by the public. Ancestral Fear. Again, I am inclined to think that there is a deep-seated ancestral fear to be overcome in flying. The most fundamental fears in human nature are the fear of fall ing and the fear of sudden, loud noises. Perhaps our ancestors were tree dwellers. If they were, the fear of falling may have been bred into us long before we were what we are. At any rate, I think most of us contemplate with peculiar painfulness a tumble through space with nothing to hang on to by which to save ourselves. It would be much nicer to die of almost anything else in a good, solid bed. The remedy for this fear, so far as it operates in flying, is experience. Flying in rough air, for example, is a series of unpredictable falls. To the passenger taking his first flight, these falls often bring an instinctive reaction in the viscera, accompanied by an uncomfortable muscular tautness. But he gets accustomed to this sensation of falling, he learns a certain ease, relaxed attitude, the visceral strain disappears, he has confidence in the ’plane, and no longer worries about a swift descent to disaster.

Lurking Bogies. Root out this nameless fear with education, and this visceral fear with experience, and the average man will take to flying naturally, for convenience, for enjoyment, for comfort, without the feeling that every time he steps aboard a ’plane he is a daredevil starting on a great adventure. Of course the aeroplane will never be 100 per cent safe. Even the ox-cart is a mild murderer. Every device for going somewhere has its own little private set of dangers, and there is another set common to them all. We try to reduce life to a dead level of security, but these lurking bogies get us if we don’t watch out. Which is, of course, no argument for staying at home, w'here a vicious ladder may do us in as thoroughly as a tailspin. The aviation industry is youthful, but it has had the experience of many an older industry to go by. Those in charge of it are keenly aware of the risks, and in general every precaution is taken for safety. How High Will We Fly? Something in the nature of a specific answer to the layman’s speculation as to how high he will fly is provided in a continuing study of the effects of altitude upon American airmen. That answer is that the average person, flying in his own ’plane, or in a transport liner, probably never will get beyond a maximum of 10,000 feet except on rare occasions. At least, dependent upon his own physical resources, it is known that beyond that range the average individual begins to feel the effects of a lack of oxygen. Beyond that in the case of sustained roaming through the upper air it is likely that it will be necessary to , provide artificial oxygen. In a transport craft it might represent something of a difficult achievement. Another point made in the study should be of interest to the individual contemplating his aeronautical future; namely, that diminished oxygen is the most insidious and potentially dangerous condition in aviation. The record of the insidiousness of lack of oxygen is fairly complete and uniform. There is, for instance, the story of Apollo Soucek, who, on one of his record shattering altitude flights, allowed his ’plane to spin crazily down from the peak. Faintly conscious, lack of oxygen had made him indifferent to further effort to control the ’plane until he had fallen several thousand feet. There are many other instances of sudden loss of interest in control of the craft and sudden loss of consciousness, too, due to depleted oxygen. The effect insidiously creeps up on one. Before he knows it, especially at altitudes around 25,000 feet, the flyer may be “out.” So oxygen probably will dictate that the average individual remain between 10,000 and 15,000, and most of the time lower than that. (Anglo-American N.S.—Copyright.)