Does Your Airline Pilot Know How to Escape From a Stall?

These days, there’s a good reason fear of flying is classified as a phobia: Fatal airline accidents are exceedingly rare.

They could be made rarer. When planes do crash, the No. 1 cause is pilot loss of control. From 2001 to 2010, 1,756 people died in 20 such disasters. About half of these accidents involved aerodynamic stall, which is when the wings become so sharply angled into the wind that they no longer generate lift and the plane becomes dead weight. If stall-related accidents could be avoided, airplane fatalities might drop by as much as a quarter.