Deer Park Pipeline Fire Raises Questions

 

Around 10 A. M. Monday, Sept. 16, someone in a white SUV drove it through a chain-link fence in Deer Park, Texas and straight into the above-ground valve structure of an Energy Transfer Company liquefied-natural-gas underground pipeline in the city of Deer Park, Texas.  When the pipe failed, it released the several hundred pounds per square inch of pressure that was keeping the material liquid along the miles of pipe that led to the valve.  The liquid began boiling into gas, and spewed out a column of white vapor that immediately caught fire. 

 

The resulting flame towered a hundred feet or more in the air and produced a plume of black smoke that could be seen for miles.   The fire burned for four days, from Monday to Thursday, and was so big that International Space Station astronaut Don Pettit could see it from space and sent a photo down to prove it.  Four people were injured, houses near the site were evacuated, and millions of dollars of damage was caused by the fire before it finally burned itself out sometime on Thursday Sept. 19.  Once it was safe to approach the area, medical examiners recovered a body from the vehicle that caused the fire.

 

Residents of the now somewhat-ironically-named Deer Park are no strangers to petrochemical disasters.  Living in one of the most concentrated areas of oil refining and petrochemical production in the world has both advantages and disadvantages.  Some of the advantages are that there are usually plenty of good, stable jobs for people who are willing to work hard and take risks, and the city's tax base is jet-propelled by billions of dollars invested in plants and equipment.  Some of the disadvantages are that you live in an atmosphere that is never entirely free of chemicals that may have long-term health risks, and sometimes things happen that pose more immediate dangers, for example a fire that melts the interior of the car that you had to abandon during an evacuation.

 

Partly to avoid insurance costs that would bankrupt any business, the refinery and petrochemical industries are some of the most safety-conscious in the world.  I was once privileged to take a tour inside a working refinery, after viewing them from afar for most of my growing-up life in Texas.  To gain this privilege, I had to sit through an hour-long series of training videos, sign a form, and when it got time to take the tour, all they did was load us on a bus and drive us through the place, maybe with a fire truck following after, I don't exactly recall. 

 

But despite the best safety precautions human minds can devise, other human minds can come up with ways to thwart them.  A friend of mine who lived and worked in Deer Park for many years has told me that the accident happened in a large right-of-way that carries many pipelines interconnecting the various plants in the Deer Park and La Porte area, which is on the Houston Ship Channel.  A video captured at the time of the accident shows the SUV in question traveling well above the speed limit and steering straight for the valve assembly.  Although the body recovered from the wreckage of the truck has not yet been publicly identified, reasonable speculation is that it is a case of suicide committed by someone who might have had inside knowledge of which valve to hit.  Although terrorism isn't suspected by the authorities, the investigation is too new to have produced much in the way of firm results.

 

Some residents of the area have called for additional protection for vulnerable pipeline infrastructure.  It would take something pretty substantial such as concrete barriers to prevent a similar intentional attack with a heavy vehicle, and there are plenty of vulnerable pipeline stations scattered around Texas and the rest of the country.  If this was simply a spectacular way for an isolated individual to commit suicide, it is likely not to be repeated any time soon, and the idea of passing regulations to make all pipeline systems proof against such attacks might be judged excessive. 

 

On the other hand, the 9/11/2001 terrorist attacks on the U. S. showed what a malevolent organization can do with people who are willing to give their lives for a cause.  In terms of casualties, the destruction caused by this particular fire was relatively small, and probably would not have appealed to a terrorist bent on causing death and destruction.  Fortunately, there was little wind during the fire, and any toxic products of the fire were carried far aloft, for the most part.  Nevertheless, it was a major inconvenience while it lasted, and if it had happened closer to a more populated area such as a school, the consequences could have been much worse. 

 

Residents of Deer Park who choose to live there or work there by and large know what they're getting into.  In an ideal world, no one would have to, let alone want to, live in a place that might be a long-term hazard to your health, coupled with a small but non-zero risk of being blown up or incinerated.  In many parts of the world, especially among professional and leadership classes, the entire array of fossil-fuel industries is something to get rid of as soon as we can. 

 

But few of the people holding those opinions have lived in a place where one's father and perhaps grandfather has made a good living from fossil-fuel-related work.  Nobody gets out alive, and during one's brief time on earth, doing something that can benefit others, even at risk to oneself, can be viewed as a good thing.  One person, for reasons known only to God now, decided that his own personal time was up, and chose to end that time in a spectacular way that ended one life and endangered others. 

 

We should do what we can to keep things like this from happening again.  But just as important is creating a cultural environment in which the average person can do remunerative work and feel that the rest of the world, or at least a good bit of it, appreciates what one does instead of wishing it would all just go away.   

 

Sources: I referred to reports on the fire at https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/energy-environment/2024/09/19/500356/deer-park-pipeline-fire-human-remains-suv-removed/ and https://abc13.com/post/deer-park-pipeline-blast-site-repairs-days-after-explosion-forced-residents-homes/15331135/.  The photo from space can be seen at https://www.khou.com/article/news/local/deer-park-pipeline-fire-international-space-station-photo/285-9c64b48c-b81e-48b3-aa40-ae740e057ab6. 

 

Hazards of Smartphones for Kids

 

A recent Associated Press article describes how public schools are trying to counteract the maleficent influence of smartphones.  Simply banning them from the classroom isn't enough, it seems, because kids will become glued to their devices as soon as they get them back after school.  Reporter Carolyn Thompson says that in an effort to counter the smartphone plague, a school system in Maine coordinated a week of outdoor activities, including camping and cooking outdoors in May.  A Spokane, Washington school ran a program called "Engage IRL" (In Real Life) to give students an alternative to infinite scrolls and chatrooms.  And many other schools are trying to encourage extracurricular activities to displace the domination of smartphones in their students' lives.

 

The schools are right to see a problem.  But just banning smartphones in class and adding extracurricular activities here and there isn't going to solve it, according to Jonathan Haidt.

 

Haidt, a Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University's Stern School of Business, has written The Anxious Generation, a book that everyone with children younger than college age should read. 

 

The advent of social media has caused a nearly universal sea change in the fundamentals of daily life for every child and teenager who has access to a smartphone.  There is no need to cite statistics on how much time a young person with a smartphone spends on it.  Just a circumspice (look around you) will show that unless some powerful outside force intervenes, kids will use literally every spare minute engaged in keeping up with social-media posts and rumors and all the other stuff that goes on in their personal cyberspace. 

 

Haidt marshals the most impressive set of statistics I've seen in any kind of social-science book in a long time to show that the advent of smartphones has not only been correlated with, but in most cases is the cause of, declines in all sorts of normal healthy stuff that kids used to do without prompting:  spending literal face time with other kids, playing outside, and learning how to be an adult by attaching oneself to an adult role model or two, getting a driver license, and finding a job.  On the active-harm side, incidences of anxiety, depression, visits to emergency rooms for psychological reasons, use of pornography, and suicide rates have all soared. 

 

I have described elsewhere in this space how the social-media companies have spent billions on perfecting algorithms to keep eyeballs glued to their apps, and because the user is the product, the user can't just passively watch things—he or she has to essentially live online and constantly keep updating the avatar that increasingly represents them to the online world.  Besides being a sucky way to live, this mode of existence has now been conclusively shown to be actively harmful to mental health.

 

Haidt has done for smartphones and kids what Rachel Carson did for DDT and eagles in her famous book Silent Spring, which was a foundational document of the environmental movement.  If we can muster even a fraction of the concern and activism that we focused on eagles, and apply it to our children and teenagers, we might be able to get somewhere.

 

The schools cited in the AP article deserve credit for perceiving a problem and trying to do something about it, but Haidt might not endorse their solution of increasing structured activities, although it might do some good.  If I had to summarize what Haidt advises in the closing section of his book, it would be "Less smartphones and more recess."

 

It turns out that play—just letting kids goof around and come up with fun things to do on their own—isn't just the cherry on top of the educational milkshake.  It's a vitally essential activity that forms kids' brains and souls to become capable, functional adults.  Especially when kids form groups or teams, they spend time working out problems together and face difficulties and learn how to overcome them, ideally without much adult intervention.

 

For various reasons I won't go into, the idea of just letting kids be unsupervised kids has fallen into disfavor in some circles.  The epitome of this attitude is exemplified in a photo Haidt shows to make his point that adults are trying to restrict free play unnecessarily.  It was taken at a playground of an elementary school in Berkeley, California.  A sign fully as tall as the chain-link fence it is hung on is titled "Tag Rules" followed by nine rules phrased in a way that would warm any bureaucrat's heart (e. g. "If a player doesn't want to play tag, then other players must respect that.").

 

Such stifling oversupervision is part of the problem, not part of the solution.  Haidt cites studies of experiments in which schools have brought back the old-fashioned unsupervised recess, where the kids are told to basically go outside and play for half an hour.  He has helped to found a movement called Let Grow Play Clubs, which helps schools design playgrounds that have fun stuff to play with, not the standard OSHA-approved boring playground equipment, but things like big blocks and old pieces of machinery and so on that you can do stuff with.  And keeping adults away from the kids is just as important as providing them with stimulating things to play with. 

 

Haidt even has the temerity to say that if a few kids get minor injuries while playing, guess what?  It's okay.  Better to scrape your elbow on a playground then grow up never knowing what getting hurt is like.  That sounds harsh, but it's just an example of the well-supported data he marshals to show that we are currently letting kids do the psychological equivalent of smoking three packs a day, and we not only need to take away their mental cigarettes, but help restore to them the natural stages of childhood and teenagerhood that lead, or used to lead, most people to become functional, reasonably happy adults. 

 

And that still happens, sometimes.  But for millions of kids it's not, and we need to do something about it yesterday.

 

Sources:  The AP article "Schools are competing with cell phones.  Here's how they think they could win" appeared on Aug. 24, 2024 at https://apnews.com/article/school-cell-phone-ban-extracurricular-afterschool-4d89f5b7fd7c8f1d5903f8c04f26da54.  Jonathan Haidt's The Anxious Generation:  How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness was published by Penguin Press in 2024.

The Thin Line of Trust: China Eastern Airlines Flight 5735

 

Back in March, we blogged about the crash of China Eastern Airlines Flight 5735, which crashed on March 21 during a flight from Kunming to Guangzhou, killing all 132 people on board.  At the time, it was too early to draw any conclusions, as the investigations had just begun and the flight data recorders had not yet been recovered.  Within days, however, the voice and data recorders were found, and the data recorders were sent to the U. S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) for analysis.

 

In April, rumors began to circulate in China that the crash was caused deliberately by someone on the flight deck.  These rumors were substantiated when several U. S. news outlets, including the Wall Street Journal and ABC News, reported in May that U. S. officials had determined that someone in the cockpit had pushed the control stick forward to initiate the dive from 29,000 feet that led to the crash.  The Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) has neither confirmed nor denied these reports, while grumbling that "unofficial speculation" can interfere with the ongoing investigation.  Nevertheless, until further official information is made available, it looks like deliberate action on the part of someone in the cockpit may well have caused the crash.

 

The Wikipedia article on the crash lists the three members of the flight crew:  Captain Yang Hongda, who had been a Boeing 737 pilot since 2018; First Officer Zhang Zhengping, an award-winning commercial pilot with more than a decade of experience, including the training of 100 other pilots; and Ni Gongtao, a trainee with less than 600 hours of flight experience whose official duties were simply to observe the more experienced pilots. 

 

The psychology of a flight crew is a somewhat neglected but vital aspect of the smooth functioning of the team, who must cooperate effectively under both routine and emergency conditions.  Any time there is more than one person involved in a situation, there will be questions of authority and precedence.  That is why the very titles of the flight crew indicate a precedence of authority, the captain being in charge of both first and second officers. 

 

An excessively rigorous adherence to the priorities of rank can be detrimental, as the 1997 crash of Korean Air Flight 801 illustrates.  Despite errors the captain of that flight made in his approach to the Guam airport, he was not challenged by the other two members of the flight crew until six seconds before the crash, by which time it was far too late to do anything.  Since that time, Korean Air and other flight organizations have emphasized that the authority of the captain is not absolute, and if the other members of the flight crew see that the captain has made a mistake, they should take positive action to correct it.

 

But in the case of Flight 5735, it would be hard to believe that deliberate action to crash the plane would be taken by more than one of the three flight-crew members.  If we assume that only one of the three men on the flight deck decided to crash the plane, that raises several hard questions.

 

First, one would think that two men determined to save themselves and the passengers could overpower one man bent on destroying the plane.  While I have no details of how a 737 cockpit is arranged, it's hard to imagine a way that one man could impose his will on the others and remain at the controls, if the other two were determined to stop him.

 

As long as we're imagining things, suppose the suicide pilot, let's call him, somehow smuggled a firearm along with him, and threatened to shoot anyone who interfered with him?  That would be awkward, but conceivable.  And it's not clear whether pilots go through the same security checks that passengers do, and if they do, how easy it would be to evade them in order to carry a gun on board.

 

Neither of those scenarios seem too credible.  An interesting fact from the record of the flight before the crash is that it briefly leveled off around 8,000 feet before continuing its plunge into the mountains.  This might indicate a temporary turn for the better in the cockpit battle for the controls. 

 

Another possibility is that the suicide pilot shot or otherwise disabled the other two crew members before implementing his flight to doom.  This almost makes more sense, but it still leaves open the question of how he was able to disable them:  a gun?  Some kind of spray?  A struggle would still have to take place.

 

A second question is, which of the three flight crew members may have done it?  The award-winning Zhang Zhengping would seem least likely, having invested his life in his career.  The CAAC investigated the backgrounds of all three of the crew and found nothing unusual such as outstanding debt or personal troubles that would obviously account for suicidal intent. 

 

A third possibility is that someone from the passenger area broke into the cockpit and forced the plane to the ground.  This involves the question of how mechanically difficult such a feat might be. 

 

A cursory Internet search reveals that there are no private bathrooms in airliner cockpits, meaning that the door to the passenger area has to be open to allow pilots to answer calls of nature.  Updated regulations after 9/11 mandate that at least two crew members must be in the cockpit at all times, so for example, only one pilot on Flight 5735 could leave the cockpit at a time.  A patient terrorist with a first-class seat having a view of the cockpit door could therefore wait until the door opened and make a threatening move, perhaps holding a flight attendant hostage at knifepoint (assuming he could smuggle a knife on board).  But he would still have to overpower three determined flight crew members to do the dastardly deed.

 

Well, I think we've had enough of these dismal speculations for one column.  Suffice it to say that deliberate human action looks like the most likely explanation for the fate of Flight 5735.  We may never know much more than that, unless there are clues in the cockpit voice recorders that remain to be unveiled.  Despite all the modern technology that is deployed to ensure air safety, as long as people fly the planes, we have to trust those people.  And once in a very great while, someone decides to betray that trust.

 

Sources:  I referred to the article "Flight data suggests China Eastern plane deliberately crashed:  Wall Street Journal report" posted on May 18, 2022 at https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/18/china/china-eastern-crash-wsj-report-inlt-hnk/index.html.  I also referred to the Wikipedia article on Flight 5735.   

Will Facebook Kill Holly?

 

I have to be careful about how I write today's column.  I do not want to betray any trusts.  But on the other hand, a topic that up to now has been an abstraction for me has become personal.  A statistic has turned into someone I know by only two degrees of separation.  To protect anonymity, I have changed names and some details of what I will write here.  But I assure you that what I am going to write is based on facts as personally told to me yesterday by someone I will call Holly, who is a twelve-year-old girl.

 

Facebook, which has now renamed itself Meta, has been in the news a lot lately, and in this column as well, because of revelations by a whistleblower named Frances Haugen.  Haugen is a former Facebook employee who has made thousands of pages of internal company documents public, and has testified to Congress that Facebook's own research showed how harmful Instagram and other Facebook services are to teenagers (girls especially) at the same time that Facebook's CEO (and owner of 55% of Facebook's voting stock) Mark Zuckerberg was saying that his firm did not have such data.  The blowback from articles in the Wall Street Journal and other outlets detailing the hypocritical actions of Zuckerberg and his company have been so severe that the firm dropped plans it had announced to develop a new service for preteens called Instagram Kids. 

 

A recent article on the Mind Matters website described these problems and quoted results of a 2017 survey by the UK's Royal Society for Public Health and the Young Health Movement that showed, among other damning evidence, that the average age at which a child creates an Instagram account is 10, even though the software says you must be at least 13 to join.  Among users aged 14 to 24, all but one of the social-media platforms surveyed showed a negative score for well-being. 

 

With all this as a background, let me introduce Holly.  My wife and I have known her slightly for at least a couple of years, and when she was ten she invited us to see her elementary school's production of Peter Pan, which for an older couple with no children was quite a treat.  Although she has since moved to a nearby town, she has the opportunity to visit us now and then, and yesterday was one of those visits.

 

Holly is one of those girls who will rattle on about whatever she's doing if you just stand there and look interested, so my wife and I invited her in and we listened to what she had to say about what she'd been doing since we saw her almost a year ago.  She talked about horses, a vacation trip her family took back East, and then school.  She attends school in a medium-size town that has a reputation for old-fashioned conservative family values, and if something bad is happening there, it's probably happening everywhere else too. 

 

She had her smartphone with her, of course, and as she took it out she said her parents have put some controls on it to limit her social-media use.  While I cannot recall her exact words, the following is substantially what she said next, when we asked her how things have gone at school with COVID-19. 

 

"Oh, it's been bad.  One of my friends committed suicide over the summer.  They were bullying her and it just got so bad she couldn't take it anymore.  That's why I don't mind my folks doing what they did to my phone."

 

After Holly left and I had a chance to think about the enormity of what she told me, it began to sink in that here was a twelve-year-old girl having to deal with the suicide of a personal friend of hers, caused at least in part by the baleful influence of social media. 

 

I don't know anything about this incident other than what Holly told me.  Scientists would call this "anecdotal evidence" and dismiss it as useless for analytical purposes.  But it brings home the diabolical influence of social media on children in a way that no amount of statistics or studies have done for me.  Somewhere there are parents of the sixth-grader who committed suicide who will never see their daughter reach adulthood, get married, or have children of her own.  And during the girl's lifetime, because she was one of the twenty-two million users of Instagram or whatever social media platform contributed to her death, she enriched Mark Zuckerberg personally by some amount of dollars he could charge for ads on her phone.  I hope he enjoys them now, because he won't get a chance to enjoy them where he's going.

 

Holly, at the tender age of twelve, already seems to have a realistic sense of how dangerous social media can be.  And, Lord willing, this sense will preserve her from the hazards of using Facebook products when one is a teenage girl.  But she has all of her teenage years to negotiate ahead of her, and she is not out of the social-media woods yet.

 

We live in an age that is hostile to children and teenagers in many ways.  If a child manages to survive the first nine months of its existence in the womb without being aborted, as about 600,000 children are each year in the U. S., she or he becomes a kind of hobby that our economy tolerates but does not encourage—a "lifestyle choice" that burdens the otherwise ideal worker with expenses and obligations that distract him or her from being totally devoted to the job and to consumption of products and services such as Facebook.  Upon entering school, an institution that was formerly safeguarded from commercial exploitation back in the 1960s when I experienced it, the child becomes the target of 24/7 ads from streaming services, the various entertainment platforms such as video games, and eventually from smartphones.  Arrayed against each individual child is the Big Tech oligopoly of world-class expertise that extracts the last drop of attention with manipulative artificial-intelligence-enhanced algorithms that do things no ordinary human being can understand, algorithms that can intensify social interactions into a tornado of abuse that makes death at one's own hand look like the only alternative. 

 

We prayed with Holly before she left, for protection from the many dangers that life as a girl in America presents today.  God is more powerful that Mark Zuckerberg.  But Mark Zuckerberg doesn't seem to think so.

 

Sources:  I thank Denyse O'Leary for drawing my attention to the article "Facebook's . . . Er, Meta's Instagram Problem" by Heather Zeiger, which appeared at https://mindmatters.ai/2021/12/facebookser-metas-instagram-problem/. 

Should Kids Use Instagram?

 

In mid-September, the Wall Street Journal published "The Facebook Files," a series of investigative reports that was partially based on internal documents leaked by a whistleblower.  The overall impression left by the revelations is one of hypocrisy:  a company saying in public how seriously they take their responsibility to protect their users from harm and police their content, but in private giving free passes for certain favored "whitelisted" users and conducting research that reveals how harmful Instagram can be to teenagers, especially girls.

 

Just how harmful is it?

 

Time Magazine's summary of the WSJ articles includes such tidbits as the following.  Internal research presented at Facebook showed in 2019 that "Instagram makes body image issues worse for one in three teen girls."  Among teens who reported suicidal thoughts, "6% of American users traced the issue to the photo-sharing app."  Eating disorders and depression are also linked to Instagram use by young people, which according to the article comprise about half of Instagram's user base.  "Young" was not defined, but presumably we are talking about people in their teens and early 20s.

 

In a Congressional hearing held Sept. 30 in response to the revelations, Facebook's Antigone Davis, the firm's global head of safety, disagreed with how the WSJ characterized the company's research.  She emphasized that users benefit from Instagram, which helps them in dealing with the hard issues that beset teens.  The reason for the research, she said, was "to make our platform better, to minimize the bad and maximize the good, and to proactively identify where we can improve."  But on Monday, the firm announced that it was pausing its work on a product tentatively called Instagram Kids, designed for users under 13.  Of course, anybody who is old enough to type and read can say they are 13 and try to get an Instagram account today, and millions have succeeded. 

           

One Senator drew a parallel between Facebook and the tobacco industry, which concealed internal research for years showing that smoking caused lung cancer and publicly denied the facts it knew about privately.  Suicide isn't lung cancer, but dead is dead.  While it's unlikely that a statistically significant number of teen suicides can be definitely linked to Instagram, it is an unvarnished fact that teen suicides in the U. S. have risen dramatically since the early 2000s, rising from a rate of about 10 per 100,000 in age group 15-19 to 14.5 per 100,000 by 2017, the latest year for which national numbers are available.  And COVID-19 has not improved matters in that regard.

 

Correlation is not causation, and there are many factors besides Instagram that make it hard for teenagers to negotiate life these days.  But the question before us is this:  does the harm done by Instagram (and similar photo-based media) to teenagers outweigh whatever perceived benefits the services provide?

 

Phrased that way, the question implies that the proper way to analyze this issue is a cost-benefit study.  But I'm not at all sure that's the right way to do it.  For one thing, the benefits are of many different kinds, as are the costs.

 

The most obvious benefit is financial, to Facebook, its investors, and similar media giants, along with their advertisers who pay Facebook gargantuan fees to sell goods and services.  Another category of benefit is whatever good feelings, sensations, and experiences users get from using Instagram and similar products.  The parallel to tobacco is relevant, because studies both by Facebook and outsiders show that social-media use is highly addictive, and is purposely designed to be that way.  This is an open secret, deplored even by some developers of social media, but it is well known and needs to be considered in any discussion. 

 

It's one thing if a mature, responsible adult decides to indulge in an addictive product, but there are reasons that states have minimum ages for purchasing tobacco and alcohol.  Society has made a judgment that teenagers below a certain age need to be protected from these substances, because their ability to judge such matters as alcohol or tobacco use is not yet fully developed.  Having been a teenager myself, I can vouch for the truth of that statement.

 

Some states such as Texas have already taken steps to restrict certain social-media firm activities such as banning individuals based on political content.  If we as a society decide that the benefits of Instagram to teens are not worth the harms, we could try to make it illegal for them to use it.  Under the present social dispensation, that idea sounds almost ludicrous.  But in 1965, who would have imagined that a scant thirty years or so later, smokers would be a disdained minority, unable to light up in workplaces, restaurants, or bars, and condemned to puff in freezing weather at least twenty feet from the nearest entrance?  Yet it happened, and a big factor in the social turn against smoking was the blatant hypocrisy the tobacco firms indulged in, as investigations later showed.

 

I have had at least one young person talk to me wistfully about what it was like growing up without social media, saying that he thought his smartphone was one of the biggest differences between my generation and his, and not a good one, either.  As powerful as the tobacco interests were, their wings were clipped, and they paid huge sums to states in retribution for the harms that were caused. 

 

I don't know what's going to happen to Facebook in the future with regard to their teenage customers.  In the Greek myth about Antigone, she got into trouble with a king who had defeated and killed her brother in battle, and who didn't want anyone mourning for him or burying him.  She tried to anyway, and ended up committing suicide. 

 

Facebook's Antigone Davis may be trying to bury some facts that refuse to stay buried.  With regard to the whistleblower who leaked internal data to the press, she said, "We've committed to not retaliating for this individual speaking to the Senate."  But a lawyerly reading of that sentence shows it says nothing about not retaliating for anything else the person did.  And if the experience of other whistleblowers is any guide, that person's career in social media is over, and they might as well start studying for their real-estate license or something else they can do on their own.

 

Sources:  I refereed to an NPR article on the Facebook revelations and Antigone Davis's remote testimony before Congress at https://www.npr.org/2021/09/30/1041864356/instagram-kids-safety-congress-hearing, as well as a Time article at https://time.com/6097704/facebook-instagram-wall-street-journal/.  The statistics on teen suicide are from https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2019/7/11/18759712/teen-suicide-depression-anxiety-how-to-help-resources. 

Airline Pilots as Human Infrastructure: Neglect At Your Peril

By now, enough information has emerged from the March 24 crash of a Germanwings plane in the French Alps to show that the co-pilot, Andreas Lubitz, deliberately flew the plane into the ground after waiting for the pilot to leave the cockpit and locking him out.  Data from the flight's recently recovered "black box" showed that Lubitz sped up the plane's descent in the moments before it flew into a mountain in the French Alps, killing all 150 people on board.  It also appears that Lubitz suffered from depression and was suppressing information about his condition from his employer.

For most of recorded history, suicide was a private affair.  But when trains, planes, and automobiles came along, it became technologically possible to take a lot of folks with you when you died, if you happened to be driving or flying.  And here is where the issue of what I'm calling "human infrastructure" comes in.

It's not a very good phrase, but I can't think of another one to describe the state of mind of a person whose job, mediated by engineered transportation, makes them directly responsible for the safety of others.  I'm going to stick my neck out here and claim that in certain periods of history, the committing of certain acts was essentially inconceivable.  The evidence for my claim is that nobody ever did them.

Here's one example.  Unless I've missed something (which is always possible), I believe there is no recorded case in the 19th century of any locomotive engineer (engine driver, in the UK), of his own free will, deliberately causing a train wreck that killed himself and injured or killed large numbers of other people.  It was technologically possible to do that back then, but as far as I know, nobody did. 

But in the last couple of years, we have seen at least two cases—the Germanwings crash and Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, that disappeared over the Indian Ocean—of airline pilots apparently taking their own lives and those of their passengers too.  And this doesn't include things like the hijackings that destroyed the Twin Towers in New York City on Sept. 11, 2001.  The hijackers were not authorized pilots, but they managed to learn enough about flying to do what they did.

What if the world of the 1800s was such a place that the kind of people who signed on as locomotive engineers were essentially incapable of seriously considering a suicidal act that would betray the trust extended to them by their employer and their passengers?  And what if the twenty-first century is such a different place that, despite the best efforts of airlines to screen and inspect their pilots, the kind of people who get hired as pilots include a few to whom crashing a plane with lots of people on board is not only conceivable, but seems like the best thing to do at the time? 

The kind of person you do want to pilot your aircraft is someone like Chesley Sullenberger, whose sense of responsibility to his passengers was so strong that he spent his spare time making a study of aircraft safety and devised contingency plans for various unlikely mishaps, such as having all your engines fail due to clogging by birds during takeoff.  That is exactly what happened to him on Jan. 15, 2009, as he flew US Airways Flight 1549 out of New York's LaGuardia Airport.  Sullenberger expertly maneuvered the powerless plane to a safe water landing, and everyone survived. 

Not every pilot can be a Sullenberger, but is it humanly possible to weed out the Lubitzes?  One can imagine draconian measures, such as firing any pilot who gets treated for depression.  But that would immediately lead to situations such as Lubitz apparently got into, in which he was suppressing the fact that he was seeking help for his condition. 

As long as we let human pilots control aircraft, we extend trust to them to do the right thing in whatever circumstances arise.  Some may think it obtuse or irrelevant for me to point out that in the nineteenth century, your average locomotive engineer probably believed in God, Heaven, and a Hell for people who deliberately killed themselves and took others with them.  It was a kind of belief that is not that common today among college-educated individuals, which is the only pool we take airline pilots from. 

This is not a call for all airline pilots to be Bible-believing fundamentalists.  After all, it is presumably Koran-believing fundamentalists who flew the hijacked planes into the Twin Towers.  But something has changed in the metaphysical background if we compare the 1800s to modern culture, and it has changed in a way that has made formerly inconceivable acts not only conceivable, but do-able, at least by a few bad apples.

In the days to come, we will see calls for more technological fixes that will prevent pilots from deliberately crashing planes.  Something may need to be done along these lines, and if it's effective and doesn't lead to other problems, I hope it will be.  But what I think is more important is a renewed look at the human side of the situation:  the way pilots are chosen and the way airlines keep tabs on them for subtle hints that things are not going well.  Lubitz appears to have been a loner, and while there's nothing illegal or immoral about that, it's a modern situation that has few historical precedents.  Airline pilots have such great responsibilities that it might be worth sacrificing some of their privacy to ensure that they will carry out their duties in a manner worthy of the trust we extend to them.

Sources:  For information on Lubitz, I referred to a CNN article updated on Apr. 3 at http://www.cnn.com/2015/04/03/europe/france-germanwings-plane-crash-main/.  I also referred to the Wikipedia articles on US Airways Flight 1549 and Chesley B. Sullenberger.