In 1966, a Boeing 707 operated by the British Overseas Airways Corporation took off from Tokyo en route to Hong Kong. It was a sunny, cloudless afternoon, but as the plane approached Mt. Fuji a violent wind struck it from the northwest. The gust tore the vertical fin from the tail and hurled it into the left horizontal stabilizer, which broke off in turn. As the plane twisted upward, the air pressure wrenched off another tail fin. All four engines were ripped from the wings, sending the plane spinning toward the mountain’s flank. The fuel tanks ruptured, and the entire tail section fell off, along with the right wing. By the time the plane crashed, in a forest at thirty-five hundred feet, its fuselage had broken in two and a trail of debris ten miles long stretched behind it.
The Mt. Fuji crash was one of a series of plane accidents in Japan that year. One commercial jet careened into a seawall while landing in heavy fog; another plunged into Tokyo Bay for unknown reasons; yet another, into Japan’s Seto Inland Sea, also for unknown reasons. It was one of the deadliest years in commercial-aviation history—three hundred and seventy-one passengers and crew were killed in those incidents alone—and it changed the way that airplanes were built.
When new employees come to work at the Boeing production facility in Everett, Washington, one of their first stops is often an exhibition at the company’s Safety Experience Center. It opens on a sombre note: a memorial for famous air disasters, including the successive crashes of two 737 MAXs, in 2018 and 2019, in the Java Sea and Ethiopia. Then, gradually, the tone grows more hopeful. At Boeing, as throughout the aviation industry, disasters led to innovations. Oxygen masks and electronic anti-skid brakes were introduced in the nineteen-sixties, along with bird cannons at airports, to shoo off Canada geese and fellow-fliers. Overhead bins got latched doors that same decade, to keep luggage from toppling onto passengers’ heads. Satellite communication came along in the seventies; automated flight-management systems, capable of plotting a plane’s course, speed, and altitude, in the eighties. Radar systems got more accurate; planes grew stronger, sleeker, and more flexible. Pilots got better at skirting turbulence—or, if they couldn’t, at slowing down and “riding the bumps.”
“Once I finally found him, I didn’t have the heart to harpoon him.” Cartoon by Mick Stevens
“When people get hurt around our products, we need to take every ounce of education from it that we can,” Jacob Zeiger, a senior air-safety investigator at Boeing, told me, when I visited the Boeing facility this past December. “These technical findings are sacred.” Within hours of any major incident involving a Boeing plane, Zeiger and his team are notified, and they may spend a week to ten days studying the damage and interviewing the crew, piecing together what went wrong. In 2008, for instance, the engines on a 777 stopped responding, and it crash-landed short of a runway in London, shearing off its landing gear. Afterward, a team of investigators re-created the plane’s fuel system in a Boeing lab. A small heat-exchange unit, they found, had accumulated ice during the flight. Every 777 has since been retrofitted with a new version of the unit. Thanks to decades of such refinements, today’s jets may be the world’s most reliable machines. Flying in them is less likely to kill you than walking on staircases.
It’s the sky that’s grown more unreliable. Fierce storms and erratic winds are increasingly common with climate change. But the rise in clear-air turbulence, often far from storms and undetectable by radar, is especially alarming. Since 1979, clear-air turbulence has increased by as much as fifty-five per cent over the North Atlantic and forty-one per cent over the United States. If temperatures continue to rise unabated, it could more than double by the middle of the century. Death by turbulence is still vanishingly rare, but Flight SQ321 did have one fatality. Geoffrey Kitchen, a retired insurance salesman from Bristol, England, on holiday with his wife of fifty years, died before the plane landed. Its sudden plunge had come as such a shock, it seems, that it gave him a heart attack.
I’m not an especially fearful flier, but I dread turbulence all the same. I avoid seats in the back of a plane, check radar maps before a flight, and keep my seat belt buckled even when the light is off. I remember a conversation I once had with the forensic anthropologist Clyde Snow, who spent years investigating plane crashes for the F.A.A. In his experience, he said, when a crash did have survivors, a disproportionate number of them were men: they were the first to shove and claw their way to the exits. As he put it in 1970, in a study that included two plane crashes in which the passengers had to flee from burning cabins, “It appears that younger males were definitely favored . . . where speed, strength, and agility would be expected to play a dominant role.” In those two crashes, even the old men survived at a higher rate than the adult women and children.