Don't take stupid steps backwards
On avoidable airplane disasters, the median age of an American, and the risks involved when people are willfully ignorant of history
The median American age is about 39 years, meaning that half the country has no useful personal memory of anything prior to the 1990s. But we’re still engaged in a technological era that has significant roots in the 1960s and 1970s.
■ One stark example is the progress that’s been made in air travel. Those people who only remember the 1990s and onward are unlikely to realize how common crashes once were, and how often they were caused by conditions that we basically ignore today.
■ A flight in September 1974 crashed because the cockpit crew was talking politics and stopped paying attention to their landing. Then in the following May, another airliner crashed because of a microburst.
■ As a society, we’ve done a lot to solve these problems. There are firm rules now about maintaining discipline in the cockpit. We equip airports with downburst detection radar systems and airliners with electronic systems for detecting dangerous wind shear. Increasingly, though, the causes that brought about these improvements will fade from living memory, and people will have to defend complicated and expensive procedures to prevent disasters that nobody actively remembers.
■ That’s where the real peril comes in. We are perpetually at risk of backsliding when people who don’t know why existing rules and procedures matter matter come to equate their ignorance with superior knowledge. They think they can reject or roll back procedures whose history they don’t understand without facing consequences.
■ It’s a problem that isn’t bounded by domains. Air travel safety happens to offer some vivid examples, but we have procedures and policies in every field from public health to public safety to global diplomacy that are in place today because of calamities long ago. And we have a lot of people who don’t know their history and don’t want to know it, and some of them are leading public policy into extremely dangerous situations. History is a fountain of knowledge if we choose to heed it: Don’t take stupid steps backwards.