Hello, this is your captain speaking, I am so proud to welcome you to the new 99% Airlines! As you know, we were just able to change the name, because we have achieved what few human beings achieve in their lifetimes: 99% reliability, and 99% safety. So I hope you will all sit back and relax, and know that in about two hours, only *two* of you are gonna die!
Our standards are so much higher than 99%, in every category, in every corner of our amazing society, in the USA and around the world.
Imagine 99% grocery, 99% gas station, 99% drug store, 99% traffic light . . .
99% police force? We may be there, or worse, depending on your appearance, the neighborhood, the situation and the circumstances.
But 99% is pretty damn good, don’t forget. And that in a way is what this is about.
Condemning the 99% because of the failures of 1% is dangerous and corrosive.
Ignoring the solid performance of the 99%, or even the 90%, makes their job harder and morale sink, creating, in my view, an environment that encourages and pushes bad behavior and worse and worse outcomes.
While our society depends on overwhelming, casual excellence — when is the last time you worried about the contents of a bottle of beer or water? — we must focus on shortcomings to get better, and at least stay at our high standards.
But we can fill the media with outlier problems, in the process of improvement, yet give the overwhelming feeling that everything is broken and dangerous in the process.
We need to keep the situation clear while we are doing this.
The system is overwhelmingly safe and trustworthy, in the case of US airlines and commercial jet aircraft, to link the introduction to the conclusion of this brief alert. Don’t get me started on Boeing, but remember that there are more than 30,000 commercial flights on US airlines every day, and that in the past decades, precisely one person was killed. One!
As a student educated in the design of aircraft, and the automatic stability and control of aircraft, decades ago, if you had told me that flying in a jet aircraft would be safer than driving, or hanging around your living room, that would have been nuts. It still is just that, nuts. And a fact.
best luck to US — b.rad