Air France Jet Hit Water Largely Intact, Investigators Say
online.wsj.com
online.wsj.com
People should know by now that air travel is much safer than car travel, so this won't affect their safety in any tangible way.
Perhaps this is more about a fascination with flight? Most people would like to learn to fly if they could?
We have sort of a professional interest here. We may not all be airline avionics engineers... we may not be any of us airline avionics engineers... but the failure of complicated systems is certainly something we all have to deal with, hacker or startup founder, and learning about them is not time wasted.
The fact that it's a rare and big occurence makes it newsworthy. It plays to a lot of peoples natural fear of flying[1] which makes the story that much better. The fact that a lot of people usually get killed helps too. Even though it's a rare event it seems like it happens all the time, simply because it's a major worldwide newsstory every single time. This tricks people into believing that flying is unsafe - they constantly see newsstories and documentaries about people who have died in an air crash.
People are afraid of sharks for much the same reason, even though your chance of being devoured by a shark is significantly smaller than the chance of falling down the stairs and dying
[1] This natural fear could well be rooted in the evolutionary advantage of being scared when you are up high looking down. The ones that weren't scared fell off the cliff and died.
I think the investigation stories are supported by interest in the original crash. I think the same thing about the "X attacks and or kills person" stories and the rest of the "person killed in X odd circumstance stories".
It depends how you drive and how you fly.