Airplane fatalities must be reduced. It is obvious that accidents are still happening. The job now is to make planes withstand them better. Too many people are killed in airplane crashes. It's about time to realize that pilots aren't supermen.
Accidents continue to happen and there's no sense in claiming they can be entirely prevented.
The only intelligent thing to do is to build the planes to withstand as violent a smashup as possible. Six years ago Lou Reichers was flying a big twin engine, fuselage-lift transport invented by V.J. Burnelli, when the ailerons came off over Newark Airport. There wasn't anything wrong with the design of the plane, it was just one of the things that sometimes happens to a test ship. A handful of bolts had been left out of the control hinge brackets during the assembly job. The result was a crash at 2 miles a minute.