During my 30 years in journalism, I have been asked numerous times why the news media tend to focus on the negative. “Report the good news for a change,” I have been admonished more than once by friends, relatives, sources and strangers on the street. When I was younger, I’m sure I had a standard reply that involved an eye roll (learned from my father, a career newspaperman) and a snide comment about how no one cares that something worked as it was designed, or that good news versus bad news is like beauty — it resides in the eye of the beholder. What is bad news to one side of an argument is euphoria for the other side (try searching “elections, presidential, U.S., 2012”).
But in the world of aviation, particularly in flight operations, that relativity seldom exists. If a component malfunctions, or a process fails or a human makes an error, the results can be tragic. I was stopped in my tracks a few years ago when I heard someone describe aviation as “low probability, h…
