I very much agree with Tufekci, the safety of air travel is a testament to the people who achieve it - it demonstrates their ability to build expensive, elaborate, and effective institutions and processes that are commensurate to the immense task they're tasked with.

The Boeing Max failures may prove to be the beginning of the end - they're the exact kind of failures that show the system is coming apart - these failures are institutional and political, as opposed to freakish corner cases of technology and physics.

Right now air travel safety seems to be teetering. And true to the indicator that it is, so are we.

I submitted using the title from the article metadata instead of what's displayed in the article, since the metadata title was more descriptive and less clickbaity.