SAFETY POLITICS: A RISKY BUSINESS

The explosions and plane crashes of recent years are disturbing in several respects. First, the loss of human life is tragic. Second, there is a heightened level of anxiety that the vicious events will be repeated. A third disagreeable development is Washington’s move toward limiting our freedoms under the guise of protecting us.

Two events in history hold very important lessons for those who will listen. One was the capsizing of the lake steamer Eastland in the Chicago river in 1915 and the other occurred on 7 July of last year when an engine exploded on a Delta Airlines flight during take off from Pensacola. Both incidents occurred in the wake of other disasters which spawned political reactions that turned out to be deadly in their effects.

The first case in point was the loss of 1,523 lives when the Titanic sank on 14 April 1912 and the subsequent loss of 844 persons when the Eastland capsized in the Chicago River on 24 July 1915.

The Titanic sank on her maiden voyage with many distinguished passengers on board, a fact that heightened the postmortem uproar. There developed a perception that insufficient lifeboats were available for the passengers and crew. That spawned a political movement called "boats for all." That, despite the fact that lifeboats on the Titanic could carry 1,178 persons, well in excess of the 705 passengers and crew who were actually saved.

The "boats for all" movement eventually led to the enactment of the La Follette Seaman’s Act of 1915 and that was a contributing factor in the subsequent capsizing of the Eastland.

It was erroneously asserted by the press and the politicians at the time that the capsizing was due to two other factors: (1) the ship was thought to be resting on an obstruction and the tug pulled it over and (2) the passengers on the top "hurricane" deck supposedly surged to port to look at a passing ship. Subsequent inspection of the riverbed revealed no obstruction. As for the passenger surge, it did not happen largely because the rain had kept all but about 175 people below decks.

It took eighty years and an economist, of all people, to get the story straight. George Hilton in his 1995 book Eastland: Legacy of the Titanic, lays out a compelling case. He shows conclusively that the extra lifeboats and life rafts required in the wake of the Titanic disaster made ships like the Eastland top-heavy and unstable. Just twenty-two days after the extra boats and rafts were installed on the Eastland and the first time a capacity load of twenty-five hundred passengers were on board, it capsized, resulting in Chicago’s worst disaster in terms of loss of life. Ironically, the capsizing happened so fast that there was insufficient time to load and launch the lifeboats.

The 11 May crash of ValuJet’s flight 592 in the Florida Everglades was also a terrible disaster. It killed all 110 people on board. Like the Titanic disaster, the political opportunists quickly jumped into the ValuJet controversy. They claimed that because of deregulation, safety at low-fare airlines is compromised in favor of higher profits. Apparently, those critics believe the absurd notion that a firm makes more profit by killing its customers.

The Federal Aviation Administration nonetheless grounded ValuJet on 17 June citing vague safety and maintenance concerns. That was a similar action, in economic terms, to the pre-crash order by the FAA to limit ValuJet expansion to other airports. Both actions serve to restrict competition. But they do little or nothing to improve safety. Indeed, reducing competition might actually have worsened passenger safety.

The grounding came at a very bad time. The summer travel season was near its height. The Olympics were beginning to attract athletes and spectators to Atlanta, ValuJet’s home base. The temperatures were warm throughout the South which always make takeoffs more difficult. Moreover, the hurricane season was just starting. Indeed, Bertha hit North Carolina on 12 July. All of that put a strain on the capacity of other airlines to carry ValuJet’s passengers.

When systems are stressed to capacity, even small flaws can be magnified into serious consequences. On 6 July, a flight from Pensacola to Atlanta operated by ValuJet’s hometown rival, Delta Airlines, was filled to capacity. As the flight was taking off, the engine hub fractured and flying turbine blades killed a Michigan woman and her twelve-year-old son. While the connection between those events cannot be proven conclusively at this time, it should not take eighty years to see that concentrating passengers into fewer airplanes does not improve safety.

We should not forget the connection between the Titanic and the Eastland nor the possible connection between the ValuJet and Delta incidents. We should not allow the crash of TWA flight 800 and the Olympic bombing in Atlanta to erode our freedoms and possibly in-crease the likelihood of other disasters.

There are strong incentives for airlines to provide safety for their customers and their employees. By contrast, the incentives for the political establishment are to produce policies which overemphasize minute dangers and to play down the value of generally safe operations. Those policies are not very effective and sometimes even counter-productive.

When the political system can do nothing to help, the best policy is to do exactly that, nothing.

Jim Johnston Policy Adviser, Heartland Institute