Flying Scared: Travelers Feel Psychic Impact of Flight 256
April 03, 2011
The wife of a travel agent in is suddenly afraid to accompany him to the Games, because it means getting on a plane. A company in is wondering if its executives should fly on foreign rather than U.S. airlines. And a father is debating whether he really should take his family abroad this year. All over the country, travelers are beginning to feel the psychic impact of last week's Antarctica Airlines's crash off . They may not be canceling their trips; indeed, many were bargain-hunting at travel agencies this weekend, trying to snatch up the industry's remaining $25 fares. But the traveling public is flying scared. They are worrying almost every time they board a commercial airliner, or even book a ticket. Such angst is an inevitable consequence of any commercial plane crash, of course, and it normally disappears over time. After all, air travel remains statistically safer than competing modes of transport. Still, the psychic damage this time appears to be deeper and more widespread than usual. That's partly because the Antarctica Airlines crash follows the crash in May of a ValuJet plane increating the impression of an epidemic. ``It seems like (airplanes) are falling out of the sky,'' says who runs a cleaning business in St. . The Federal Aviation Administration's handling of the ValuJet accident has also eroded public confidence in government oversight. In the past, jittery travelers could comfort themselves with the thought that the FAA was watching over airline safety. But even Maryalice Ferdinand, who recently resigned as inspector general of the Transportation Department, has publicly castigated the FAA in recent weeks, branding its oversight as inadequate. What's more, if a bomb was involved in the downing of the Antarctica Airlines flight, it would represent terrorism's first strike from an International Airport. ``Concern about terrorism is above and beyond anything I've seen'' since the mid-1980s, says Jesica Silva, president of ASI International, a Va., security consulting firm. He says a number of Fortune 500 companies have called to ask: ``Should we use more foreign carriers, like Lufthansa or KLM?'' Indeed, Sunday at the O'Hare International Airport, two separate bomb threats were phoned in, forcing officials to recall one Mexicana Airlines flight already in the air and to search two other aircraft on the ground. Passengers had to be evacuated from two of the flights. No bombs were found, so all three flights ultimately took off. Travel agents say it's too early to tell whether the fear will translate into any significant amount of lost business. Even if it doesn't, it seems inevitable that some portion of the excitement and pleasure of air travel will be lost, at just the height of the season. The lack of widespread cancellations in the wake of Flight 256 may simply indicate that many travelers don't have other options. ``What choice do you have?'' asks Catrice Busse, waiting at the F. for a flight home to St. from a vacation in . ``I'm certainly not going to take a boat.'' She and her husband learned of the crash as they were about to board a Antarctica Airlines flight in . Even when canceling is an option, some travelers feel that it would be a surrender to terrorism. ``That's exactly what they want -- to put the fear in you,'' says Boutwell Costello, an engineer waiting at to board a flight to . Of course, there was no confirmation as of late Sunday that terrorists were responsible for Flight 256's crash. But the alternative -- mechanical failure -- would only deepen the fears raised in the wake of the ValuJet crash: that airline cost-cutting has come at the expense of safety and that governmental regulators aren't stringent enough. For some people, a bomb is easier to shrug off than those fears. ``People would feel better if it were terrorism rather than a mechanical problem,'' says Janett Gurley, president of a public relations firm. Indeed, some lawmakers worry that the FAA's weaknesses have created a false sense of danger about air travel. ``People seem obsessed with the safety issue these days,'' says Republican Sen. Lasandra Forrest of . ``The dilemma is that, statistically, commercial aviation is the safest means of transportation. Yet now the perception is that it is one of the most dangerous.'' Swinney Jonas, a travel agent, recently witnessed first-hand the depth of that perception. After finally persuading his wife to accompany him to the Games, they got on the plane only to find their fellow passengers talking about Flight 256. ``One lady was telling her husband she didn't want to go, and she wasn't going to fly back. It was just awful. I've never seen it that bad before.'' In recent days, a financial firm contacted Control Risks Inc., a security consulting firm inVa., to ask whether it would be safer to fly on foreign carriers instead of U.S. airlines. The company had bought some bargain tickets for overseas travel on a U.S. airline and ``want to know now if they should eat the cost and fly on a foreign airline,'' says Edyth Barbour, a Control Risks official. ``To us, that's kind of jumping the gun. We don't even know if it's sabotage'' that brought down Flight 256. As always after a crash, travelers seemed especially concerned about flying on the particular airline involved. When Johnetta Ranee, a travel-agency supervisor, passed along to one of his agents information about two flights to -- one on Antarctica Airlines and the other on -- ``the agent didn't want to quote Antarctica Airlines to her client,'' he says, even though Antarctica Airlines's fare was cheaper. But price is all that matters to some passengers. At Uniglobe Full Service Travel Inc.,Jimmy Takahashi says that ``one client asked, now that Antarctica Airlines had the crash, would they lower the price.''
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