"RAINMAN" AND SOUTHWEST AT MIDWAY

This week, I've had to answer several message board postings and
emails about the Southwest accident at Midway in Chicago. In some
cases, I had to deal with primitive thinking on the part of the person I
was responding to.

In primitive thinking a person organizes everything into oversimplified
categories. When it comes to flying, the categories are: "safe" and
"unsafe" (or "safe" and "dangerous").

If you saw the movie "Rainman", you may remember that Dustin
Hoffman's character, an idiot savant, would only fly Qantas. Why?
Because Qantas has never crashed. Since Qantas has never crashed,
in primitive thinking that means Qantas is "safe". Other airlines have
crashed. In primitive thinking that means all other airlines are "unsafe."

(Granted, for pessimists, an accident-free record means an airline is
"due" for a crash.)

Though Qantas has never had a crash, it has flown ONLY 1,020,000
flights. That is not a lot of exposure. Delta has had three crashes. But
those crashes have taken place while flying 20,000,000 flights. That
is about one crash per 7,000,000 flights. Delta has flown - like Qantas
- 1,020,000 flights many times without an accident. But in three cases
of flying 1,020,000 miles, Delta did have an accident. One could argue
that Delta's record, one accident per around 7,000,000 flights is superior
to Qantas with no accidents in 1,020,000 flights.

We can make a statistical assessment and determine what the proba-
bility is that Qantas is safer and also the probability that Delta is safer.
But probability is as far as we can go. No one can say with certainty
which is safer.

But consider Southwest again. Southwest has flown 9,500,000 flights
and never crashed. Perhaps Southwest is safer than both Qantas and
Delta. Does going off the end of a runway constitute a crash?

If the same landing performance had taken place at O'Hare, there would
have been a normal conclusion to the flight. Why? O'Hare has longer
runways; the Southwest 737 would have gotten stopped long before it
reached the end of the runway.

If it had landed on a runway of the same length at some other airport
which has proper runway overruns, no damage would have been done.

Even at Midway, which does not have room for standard 1000 foot
overruns, there is room for a newly developed surface which slows
an airliner down rapidly, because the wheels sink into the surface,
thus preventing an accident. Why doesn't Midway have this? Money.
The average price per runway end is $4 million. The government
doesn't requires it . . . until the year 2015! As I have said many times
here, the FAA is NOT a safety organization; it is a political organization,
and unless there is a political reason to do something to enhance
safety, it doesn't get done. Even when there is a political reason to
do something to enhance safety, the FAA - likely as not - does some-
thing (that costs less) that APPEARS to answer the problem, but doesn't.

But back to primitive thinking. In my opinion, to be an adult, one has
to learn to think in more sophisticated categories than one did as a
child. Everything has risk. Nothing is totally safe.

Being a grown-up means making assessment of relative risk. This is
what savvy investors do in the stock market; they look at the risk of
the stock going down, and the possibility of it going up, and make an
assessment whether to buy or not.

A person whose intellectual and emotional domains are open for
business (the business of living) has the job of sorting through a lot
of information. Others start to make an assessment of risk, and upon
finding out there is any danger at all, suddenly run for some mental exit.

For a person who makes a practice of running for the mental exit
when awareness of risk comes to mind, ANY kind of association is
accepted - without use of critical or analytical judgement - as a valid
and conclusive connection. Just the fact that Southwest had some-
thing happen that - though safe for the passengers - caused the death
of someone on the ground, can lead a person doing primitive thinking
to be shocked upon hearing the word Southwest Airlines, or by know-
ing he or she has a flight planned on Southwest.

Due to primitive oversimplification of things into "safe" and "unsafe",
if there is an accident of ANY kind, the person suddenly sorts South-
west into one of their two categories ("safe" and "unsafe") as "unsafe".
In other words, Southwest equals crash.

On the other hand, when a person hears there is a crash at the Indy
500 or at Daytona Speedway, the person does not decide to never
drive again. Why? Because people feel in control when driving. That
allows them to take in, and to sort through, information about auto-
mobiles without being threatened emotionally.

Instead of grappling with conflict and with anxiety, people limited to
thinking in primitive terms try to rid themselves of conflict and anxiety
simplistically. They ban anything that causes anxiety and conflict from
awareness (often with the help of drugs, alcohol, primitive religious
beliefs, or a combination of these). They divide the world into two
domains, the person's "ME-Domain" and the person's "NOT-ME-Domain".
Things expelled into the NOT-ME Domain are threatening. In time, as
more and more is expelled into the person's NOT-ME-Domain, the
NOT-ME-Domain's supply of dangers builds up. Paranoia develops.
The unfamiliar world becomes full of dangers. And control is the only
source of safety.

Things regarded as "safe" are assigned to the ME-Domain. Things
regarded as "unsafe" are lumped in with the other dangerous and
threatening things in the NOT-ME Domain.

This means, when Southwest has this incident, and moves from the
ME-Domain to the NON-ME-Domain, it is connected the total dangers
and risks of all the things assigned to the NOT-ME-Domain. In other
words, Southwest can no longer be seen as an airline that caused in
millions of flight, the death of one boy on the ground, but as the
epitome of danger!

In the more advanced way of mentally operating, we recognize there
are no absolutes, and that everything has a variety of characteristics,
both "good" qualities and "bad" qualities, or pros and cons.

If one is suffering from phobia due to primitive thinking, and massive
danger out there in the NOT-ME-Domain, what can be done? In general,
long term psychotherapy can help one learn to live. As to flying, we can
get results very quickly.

We can engage in a - pardon the expression - crash course on learn-
ing how flying works, and learning to think about the relative risks and
rewards of flying like other people do.

If this kind of personal growth is something a person is unwilling to do,
either ones life will be limited, or one must rely on others to make
decisions for them. This works in investment also. If you don't know
what stock to buy, then leaving ones investing to a mutual fund manager
with a good track record may be wiser.

So, either get some help by ordering the SOAR Video Course on DVD,
or just get on board and ask the captain whether you should worry or
not. And if the captain says "No, don't worry", then - understand your
limitations (instead of thinking you know better) and go with what the
expert says.

Either way, there is nothing about this accident that should cause any
change in judgement about Southwest or assessment about safety on
Southwest.

Now down to the nitty gritty. Even though it doesn't have long runways,
and doesn't have overruns, jets have operated safely out of Midway for
years. What went wrong? The plane landed with a 13 knot tailwind. In
all my years of flying, I never landed with half that much tailwind. Is it
possible the pilot was not informed of the tailwind? I have a hard time
believing any pilot would land - knowingly - on a slippery runway with
ANY tailwind.

It will be interesting to find out why.