Why don’t the airlines give people better warnings, even when plane-crash survivors tell them how to do it? For one thing, they are in business. They don’t want to scare customers by talking too vividly about crashes. Better to keep the language abstract and forgettable. But there’s another, more insidious reason. Airline employees, like professionals in most fields, don’t particularly trust regular people. “Like police, they think of civilians as a grade below them,”
