When I got on my initial flight in this year’s epic journey, the flight attendant began the usual and requisite safety speech in a conventional fashion by talking about what would be necessary for the passengers to know and to do in the unlikely case of an emergency. This struck me for a variety of reasons as being an odd way to put it. I was flying from Portland in a 737-Max plane, and so historically speaking, while emergencies were unlikely they were not necessarily unheard of–just this year Boeing had faced yet another disaster with that particular plane on that particular carrier with a flight leaving from that particular airport when a door in the back of the plane (where I happened to be sitting) had blown out in the sky because of poor construction and maintenance and the sheer absence of structural stability for that component in the absence of pins that were thought to be surplus to requirements by someone on the long line of people responsible for keeping this plane in the skies. So while it was definitely true that an emergency of the kind that would require a plane to make an emergency landing was unlikely, it did not have a zero chance, that is for sure.

One other thing happened to bother me about the usual inanities involving the emergency language of the safety talk, as ordinary and conventional as it is. What is it that makes something an emergency? When we look at the dictionary definition of emergency (always the safest place to start, if not finish), we find that an emergency as a noun is defined as being defined by Oxford Dictionary as “a serious, unexpected, and often dangerous situation requiring immediate action.” What I wish to focus on in this definition for discussion today is the nature of what is unexpected. What sort of problems were unexpected in flying in a Boeing 737 jet in 2024? Boeing has had a bad year, and the 737-Max, like many of its recent offerings (more on these shortly), has been plagued with disaster. Two 737-Max planes in global carriers found that their automated MCAS control systems led their planes into disaster, which is itself unacceptable. With the Alaska Airlines door incident earlier this year noted previously, the 737-Max was grounded again to make sure that the ghost door that opened up in the sky did not open up for other planes of that type in the future. Although statistically unlikely, having a problem on a Boeing plane cannot be considered to be “unexpected.” It is more likely to be met with a deep sigh of resignation and a sarcastic comment like, “Here we go again.”

More to point, there are plenty of problems with flying, especially in Boeing planes, or spacecraft for that matter, that are not unexpected at all and that are not the result of random chance. One can think of the eight day tour in space for two astronauts that ended up being a trip that would last more than eight months because of Boeing’s incompetence in building a functioning rocket, forcing Elon Musk to bail them out even in the face of the usual government meddling against them because while Boeing has the right sort of politics, Elon Musk does not, even if he has vastly better spacecraft, which is supposed to be the important point. Both in my trip in the 737-Max to Los Angeles and in a 777 to Taipei (more on that in a future post), there were key problems in flying experience that were not at all unexpected because they were design flaws in the planes and especially the seats and their configuration. These were not problems of chance, but design faults. I was shocked in the 737-Max that even with passengers in the cattle car configuration, on a completely full flight with no room for anyone, that there could be a configuration that would require an additional exit. If they tried to pack us any closer we would be sardines and not people. We are Americans–not a small people–and I barely fit into my seat as it was, sadly. On my next two planes, the 777, the seats themselves on the China Airlines flight were not designed for tall people, and at 5’11” with most of my height in my legs, I am far from a giant, and yet the headrest came to my neck and pushed my head foreword, making it hard to sleep on the flights without slumping into a more comfortable position where my head got some rest at least.

These sorts of problems, and many others, are not emergencies. When problems are baked into the design of systems and technologies by their creators, we cannot say that they are unexpected because they are merely the natural consequences of bad design. Planes that have improper control systems, have doors hidden in the fuselage, seating arrangements that seem to be a test of the starting conditions of deep vein thrombosis, and seats poorly designed for people of average height are not the starting conditions for emergencies. They are rather the signs of crisis at companies that have lost their way and belie their claims to put the needs and interests of their passengers (the ones who pay the bills that keep them in business) first. One wonders how things have gotten to this point, where companies think that their customers are foolish or inattentive enough not to call to mind the way that those companies care more about social credit than doing right by their customers, care more about activists who do not even like their product to begin with than those whose support is necessary to keep them in business. How did people ever get so dumb? Such a thing cannot be an accident.