Climate of fear can be fatal
ONE of the main causes of death for airline passengers in recent decades is being shot down by somebody’s military. Not the very biggest, of course: accidents account for ninetenths of all deaths in civilian airline crashes, and terrorist attacks and hijackings cause most of the rest. But a solid 2.5% of the deaths are due to triggerhappy people in military uniforms.
The statistics are pretty reliable for socalled ‘‘major incidents’’ (more than 50 deaths): 1379 airline passengers were killed in civilian planes shot down because they were offcourse or simply misidentified, out of a total of 57,767 deaths in 594 crashes since the first ‘‘high fatality’’ crash in 1923.
The first was an El Al plane that strayed into Bulgarian airspace in 1955, the second an offcourse Libyan airliner shot down by Israel over the Sinai Peninsula in 1973. The last of the military shootdowns in which actual fighters were involved was an offtrack Korean Air Lines jet shot down by a Soviet fighter in 1983. All 269 passengers and crew were killed.
Since then, the killing has been done by surfacetoair missiles with no visual identification. The first of these was in 1988, when the US Navy ship Vincennes, operating illegally in Iran’s territorial waters, shot down an Iran Air jet bound for Dubai with 290 people aboard in the mistaken belief it was a fighter plane. They all died.
Ukrainian Air Force missiles shot down a Siberia Airlines flight over the Black Sea in 2001 during a military exercise, killing 78. In 2014, Russianbacked rebels fighting in eastern Ukraine shot down a Malaysian Airlines plane and killed all 298 passengers and crew.
Now 176 people, many of whom were Canadian citizens or residents, have been killed just off the end of the runway in Teheran by a young Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps technician who thought he was shooting down an American drone. At least his commander acknowledged his personal responsibility — “I wish I was dead” — but the Iranian Government lied about it for three days.
Technically, this kind of mistake is inexcusable. You don’t even need highcost military technology: a free Swedish app called Flight Radar 24 will give you realtime flight data on your phone for all civilian airliners in the air in your vicinity. What we are dealing with here is human error — driven by paranoid politics and huge time pressure.
Nothing can be done about time pressure: decisions really do sometimes have to be made in seconds if you suspect that you have a ‘‘hostile’’ incoming on the radar. Paranoia might be easier to address in principle, but it’s equally inevitable in practice: all the shootdowns happen in countries that are in acute military confrontations of one sort or another.
That’s the point, really: this is fundamentally a political and military phenomenon, not a technical malfunction or mere human error. We live in a far more peaceful world than our distant ancestors did, but our deepest cultural traditions are still tribal. Once a confrontation gets going, we quickly turn into warring villagers.
It is hard to imagine an ‘‘accidental’’ shootdown of a civilian aircraft over Canada nowadays. Back in the Cold War days, however, there were surfacetoair missile systems in Canada, designed to shoot down Soviet bombers but perfectly capable of making the same sort of mistake that killed a planeload of Canadians over Teheran last week. Nobody is invulnerable, and nobody is immune to the paranoia.
On the other hand, don’t despair. Much of the world now lives in countries where the risk of war is very low or entirely absent, and most cities are not surrounded by antiaircraft missiles. We have already travelled a long way from the time when every human society lived in constant fear of all its neighbours.
This is still a work in progress. The past century has seen the most destructive wars in history — which was inevitable, given the growth in technology, wealth and population. But it was also the first time people ceased to see war as natural, honourable, and potentially profitable, and latterly warfare has gone into a steep decline.
There could still be backsliding, especially if the climate crisis overwhelms us, but so far there is promise. The world’s population has more than doubled in the past halfcentury, but the number of people killed in war is less than a tenth of what it was in the previous halfcentury.
Planes are much bigger; there are now around a million people in the air at any given moment, though, so there are also more people being killed in shootdowns. It’s never any consolation to tell people that things are getting better on average when they have been devastated by personal loss. But for what it’s worth, they are.