You probably heard about the terrible air crash in New York on Saturday between a small plane and a tourist helicopter. Nine people were killed.
There is a follow-up article today in the Daily News by a reporter, Joe Jackson, who went to check out the tourist helicopter trade a day after the crash. The article makes it sound as though he was expecting there would be no customers for rides. But there were plenty of people who still wanted an aerial tour of the city. Jackson got on a helicopter himself. The French family he rode with “were more interested in the sites below,” but “I was warily eying the other helicopters and planes off in the distance and kept wishing I could slide the window open to get a breath of fresh air.”
Perhaps it’s not so surprising that someone would be more apprehensive about taking a ride the day after a crash. What’s interesting, however, is that the journalist seemed to be the only person around who was really worried. Now, maybe his fear was really just shtick, or maybe he was sent by an editor to bring back a story about how tourists are petrified to ride helicopters — and, since he was the only one who was scared, he had to write himself into the story.
But to me, the story illustrates something else.
Most of the unperturbed tourists he writes about are Europeans, as were the people who died in Saturday’s crash. (It is, after all, high tourist season in New York; for all I know, 90 percent of the people who take these rides are foreigners.) Why are they so much less jittery than Jackson himself?
One thought that came to mind was that the average tourist may be a better risk assessor than the average New York journalist. (If so, that‘s a scary thought.) Maybe it also has something to do with the fact that media hysteria in Europe about this kind of tragedy tends to be a shade more subdued than in the U.S.
The fact is, there could hardly be a safer time to ride a tourist helicopter than immediately after a crash, when everyone is on high alert. But just as investors love to sell in a crumbling market, we are all groomed every day by media hysteria to throw away all logic when it comes to assessing risk. I am glad the French family didn’t fall for it, and that they had a nice ride.
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Maybe the European tourists don’t read/watch local news and so didn’t even know about the crash? It’s so easy to read your local newspaper online that there is no need to read the Times instead just because you happen to be in New York for a few days.
Similar thing happened several years ago when I was in Hawaii. A helicpoter crashed in Maui the day before we were scheduled for a tour on Kuaii.
We all figured we were on the safest helicopter flight in history – there was no way the helicopter operators were going to let anything happen on that day of all days…
I agree. I would have gladly flown on September 11, 2001 if they hadn’t shut down air traffic. After all, 19 of the most dangerous people out there were dead. I like those odds. I got married about five weeks after that event, and I was able to rebook better hotels for my honeymoon for less money.
“there was no way the helicopter operators were going to let anything happen on that day of all days”
@1 – What made you think that the operators ‘let’ the previous crash happen, and what did you think they’d change?
You can’t assess risk without information. What if the the Maui crash was the result of poor maintenance, or failure of a part that was just as old on all the copters? The very next day, you knew none of that, and yet you figured your risk was less. You were wrong.
In fact, regardless of the reason for the crash, it was a ‘black swan’ event and very unlikely to be repeated the next day. But it was just as unlikely on the day it did happen.
Based on my exposure to journalism, journalists appear to be extremely poor assessors of risk, so the answer most likely is yes. I’m curious why you find that a scary thought.
@Jacob: The crash was considered newsworthy pretty much all around the world:
http://www.sueddeutsche.de/panorama/48/483493/text/
http://www.lemonde.fr/archives/article/2009/08/09/la-collision-entre-un-helicoptere-et-un-avion-fait-neuf-morts-a-new-york_1227035_0.html
http://www.asahi.com/international/update/0809/TKY200908090046.html
I was in Italy a couple of years ago for a vacation. I did not watch the news or pick up a newspaper once during my time there. Even if I had, I don’t understand Italian. I think this observation has more to do with foreign tourists being on vacation and not paying attention to the local media coverage.
… maybe foreign tourists only have a week in New York and aren’t going to change long-made plans because a statistically unlikely event occured (that stands zero chance of occuring again during their stay?) during their vacation? New Yorkers are in New York all the time ; worrying isn’t costing them anything. For tourists, it’s costing them a ruined vacation.