Editorial: Airliner crash just too much too soon

It is a mark of how much the world has changed that it was almost a relief yesterday to learn that the New York airline disaster was most likely an accident. Even the travel industry was relieved. "You hate to say this," said an American spokeswoman, "but we're all hopeful this is a mechanical occurrence."

The crash, just after 9 am in New York City, was too close in time of day and location to the terror of two months ago. Yesterday's calamity happened just as the American retaliation seems on the point of displacing the Taleban Government of Afghanistan, and as United Nations members gathered for the General Assembly. It was immediately too easy to believe this was another strike from the hidden network the US is determined to hunt down.

Prominent skyscrapers such as the Empire State Building in Manhattan were evacuated and the Sears Tower in Chicago had new security measures in force. Three airports in the New York area were shut down for several hours until word came that the mishap had the signs of an accident, a view that civil authorities were at pains to maintain.

It was not an act of sabotage, "merely" the worst airline disaster - excluding the events of September 11 - for the past five years. The 260 people who died on board the American Airlines Airbus A-300 exceeds the toll of the Air France Concorde that crashed into a hotel outside Paris on July 25 last year, the Boeing that crashed into houses at Patna, India, on July 17, the Philippines crash on April 19 and the plane that fell into the ocean off Southern California in January.

Not since November 1996, when Saudi and Kazak aircraft collided, has there been a higher toll. In July of that year a TWA flight crashed, like yesterday's, soon after take-off from Kennedy International Airport, with 230 on board. It helps to recall previous air accidents because yesterday's hit us particularly hard.

It is too soon since the shock of September 11. The security of life in liberal democracies has taken too big a blow to deal with another air disaster yet. The people of New York are still coming to terms with the loss of loved ones whose remains, they now accept, will never be recovered from the ruins of the World Trade Center. Cruel fate has decreed that an airliner should crash yesterday on the neighbourhood once home to many of the firefighters who lost their lives when the second tower of the trade center collapsed.

Accident it may have been, but the crash has underlined the threat the world faces. It has often been said since September 11 that those who would hijack aircraft and fly them into office buildings would stop at nothing. The anthrax that has turned up in American mail since then has reinforced the message, although it has been less deadly than feared and the source of the bioterrorism remains undiscovered. But yesterday a second wave of air terror was instantly all too credible.

It was another blow to an airline industry that was suffering a slump even before September's multiple hijackings. Air travel remains proportionately safer than practically any other mode, but dispassionate calculations do not always count at a time like this.

More than ever nowadays it is important that people do not allow their lives to be crimped by fear. President George W. Bush quickly said so yesterday, realising the terrible effect another air disaster could have on American life at the moment.

When Americans feel less like travelling and spending, the world feels the consequence. But it is more than the shared economic interest that prompts sympathy for Americans, and particularly New Yorkers. They are resilient citizens but they must feel that fate is dealing them a particularly rough hand right now. The fizz has temporarily disappeared from their publications, reports suggest their shows and games are still somewhat flat. It would be surprising if they were able to retain their usual chutzpah.

The city's cultural reserves will eventually revive its spirit. In the meantime, a world that has looked to New York for fun and inspiration must call on its own reserves to defy those who have tried to deflate it. Life must go on.