Flying is a remarkably safe way to travel, far safer than it was a generation ago. Despite periodic fear-mongering headlines — “Why 2024 is a bad year for air accidents” The Week warned a few weeks ago — statistically speaking, the most dangerous part about flying is getting to the airport. While more than 42,000 people died on American roads in 2022 (and more than half a million between 2009-2022), there have been no fatal crashes – ZERO! – on a major U.S. airline in the last 15 years. You are literally more likely to get struck by lightning or die by a bee sting than die on a U.S. commercial flight.

How is this possible? The answer isn’t very sexy – no charismatic inventor defying the odds, no derring-do of audacious pilots. Instead, we have grown smarter about air safety through a century of painstaking research, increasingly effective coordination, improving technology, and a spirit of teamwork that has transformed the culture of aviation.

Human aviation is a relatively new phenomenon, and an exceedingly dangerous one at that. Pilot error, mechanical failure, unexpected weather changes, a bird in the wrong place at the wrong time. . .so many things can go wrong once you are up in the air. And in the early decades of flight, things went wrong all the time. With no rules, no standards, and no shared sense of what level of risk was acceptable, it was the Wild West up in the skies. Many pilots met the fate of Harriet Quimby, who in April 1912 became the first woman to fly across the English Channel but died in an aerial demonstration three months later.

Histories of aviation tend to focus on risk-takers like Quimby — the Wright Brothers, Amelia Earhart, Chuck Yeager – whose perseverance and pluck capture our imagination and win our hearts. Aviation safety, by contrast, is downright boring. No one wants to celebrate the worrywarts! Charles Lindbergh flying nonstop across the Atlantic Ocean earned him international acclaim (before his unfortunate descent into fascism). But who pays attention to Jerome Lederer, who inspected Lindbergh’s plane, the Spirit of St. Louis, before he took off?

Lederer may not be the subject of adoring biographies or biopics, but he embodies the quiet heroism of thousands of detailed-oriented people who work together to keep our skies safe — people devoted not to adventure and speed, but to safety (or “risk management,” as Lederer himself preferred to call it). These underappreciated professionals, including engineers, inspectors, and air traffic controllers, devote their lives to making flying safe for the rest of us to enjoy.

Born just a year before the Wright Brothers’ pioneering 1903 flight in Kitty Hawk, Lederer came of age with the aviation industry. Fascinated by flight after seeing pioneer pilot Glenn Curtiss at an air show, he never learned to fly himself but studied aeronautics and mechanical engineering at New York University. After graduation, he joined the infant U.S. Air Mail Service in 1926. Flying for the mail service was unfathomably hazardous — about a quarter of the service’s pilots were killed in the line of duty, generally after their planes were engulfed in flames after a crash. Lederer studied the issue and, with the help of slow-motion film, he discovered that fuel spilling onto the plane’s exhaust manifold caused the fires that were killing pilots. A small redesign reaped huge safety dividends.

Lederer’s career blossomed as the federal government took an increasingly important role in regulating air traffic. In 1926, Congress passed the Air Commerce Act, a landmark law that laid the foundation for federal oversight of aviation safety. It gave the new Aeronautics Branch of the Department of Commerce a dual (and at times conflicting) mission: to promote air commerce and ensure air safety.

In the early 1930s, two high-profile crashes put a spotlight on the need for more rigorous air safety regulations. In March 1931, famed Notre Dame football coach Knute Rockne, whose inspiring “Win just one for the Gipper” halftime speech already had become the stuff of legend, died in a crash in Kansas; U.S. Senator Bronson Cutting of New Mexico perished four years later when his plane went down near Atlanta. Congress responded by creating an independent Civil Aeronautics Authority in 1938 to investigate accidents and make safety recommendations. As the aviation industry grew, the nation needed people willing to train pilots, inspect planes, and, at times, challenge industry officials to make expensive but life-saving changes.

Lederer was eager to lend his expertise. He became the head of the federal Bureau of Aviation Safety (now the National Transportation Safety Board), during World War II. He developed procedures in accident investigation that we still follow today and pioneered the use of blinking anti-collision lights. Over objections from pilots, he insisted that aircraft be equipped with flight data recorders (the famous “black boxes,” which are actually orange in color) so that investigators could gather information needed to help minimize risks during flight.

Lederer helped modernize the nation’s air traffic control system and served as NASA’s safety director during a six-decade career. Perhaps most importantly, in 1947 he helped launch the Flight Safety Foundation, which encouraged airlines, engineers, insurance companies, and others in the industry to share data and lessons learned. Managing risks in the air, in his view, was simply too important to allow people to hoard information.

Contrary to popular and industry opinion that called for “heads to roll” following a crash, Lederer believed that people should not be punished for admitting to mistakes that led to accidents. Punishment would only lead to a culture of fear that would suppress valuable information. Instead, he argued, people should be encouraged to share their mistakes so that the whole aviation industry could learn from them.

For decades, industry leaders resisted this counterintuitive idea. Not until a series of air disasters in the 1990s did the Federal Aviation Administration embrace Lederer’s revolutionary approach. Over the course of several years, the FAA instituted a non-punitive, self-reporting system to encourage people to come forward with information about safety problems and accidents. Coupled with technological advances such as cockpit automation and improved flight simulators, this shift in thinking has led to a stunning drop in aviation fatalities.

Lederer died in 2004 at age 101, before the full effects of his safety revolution took hold. In his lifetime, aviation technology advanced from the Wright Brothers’ rickety, wooden bi-plane to commercial jets, space shuttles, and F-35 fighter jets. Just as remarkable, flying has evolved from an extraordinarily risky endeavor to perhaps the safest form of public travel – so safe, that we hardly even notice it anymore.

Sources

• Ben Cohen, “Flying in America Has Actually Never Been Safer,” Wall Street Journal, Jan. 12, 2024.

• Federal Aviation Administration, “A Brief History of the FAA”

• Flight Safety Foundation, “Jerome F. Lederer”

• Stuart Lavietes, “J.F. Lederer, 101, Dies; Took Risk Management to the Sky,” New York Times, Feb. 9, 2004.

• Jim Lefebvre, “90 years ago, Knute Rockne’s death in a plane crash shocked America and changed aviation,” Chicago Sun-Times, March 29, 2021.

• National Transportation Safety Board, “US Civil Aviation Accident Dashboard”

• Andy Pasztor, “The Airline Safety Revolution,” Wall Street Journal, April 17, 2021.

• Ian Thomsen, “Why has US commercial airline travel become so safe? Teamwork has a lot do with it,”Northeastern Global News, January 20, 2023.