This is exactly why I refuse to fly in an airplane.
Well I’m sorry to be so blunt, but that attitude is just stupid.
Most failure modes of an aircraft is to fall out of the sky and bury itself into the ground.
Nope, absolutely incorrect. Most failure modes result in “the passengers didn’t even realize anything went wrong because the 3-4 layers of safety design completely prevented a failure from causing a catastrophe.” Commercial aviation is THE model of how to perform safety engineering, with every incident being thoroughly analyzed and effective countermeasures taken by actually doing skilled root cause analysis.
I don’t know of any other industry that even comes close to commercial aviation’s level of safety engineering. (No, it’s not perfect in the Boolean sense. Do not list exceptions to “educate” me, folks, I am well versed in this industry.)
And on the other hand, by design, airplanes
want to fly. Things have to go insanely wrong for a plane to literally fall (i.e. complete unrecoverable aerodynamic stall) from the sky. It’s possible to glide a jumbo jet to the ground unpowered, and it’s been done more than once.
I highly urge you to deep dive into the YouTube channel called “Mentour Pilot”. He, a commercial airline pilot and trainer, goes into the hows and whys of aviation, including doing FAR more in-depth explanations of aviation incidents, but with the explanations of an aviation insider needed to give the proper context to what happened.
You cannot do that to a wasp, a ground mechanic thousands of kms away who decided to be incompetent that day, or a design flaw.
And this is the root problem with skeptical flyers: loss of control. We know from research that a) people are insanely bad at weighing risk, and b) vastly underestimate risk when they’re in control (and overestimate it when they’re not). You need to be honest and recognize that this psychological bias is why you don’t fly, and not facts.
Some things were just not meant to be built, the commercial aircraft is one such thing.
What an obnoxiously arrogant thing to say.