What a 1970s toilet paper shortage teaches us about our fear of flying

CNN

28-02-2025

Sometimes perception becomes people's reality. That certainly feels like the case after last month's deadly crash near Reagan National Airport, as every accident or close call seems to get magnified, raising questions about America's airline safety.
The long-term and preliminary short-term statistics suggest that airline travel is about as safe as ever. But talk to any of your friends who are remotely afraid of flying, and I bet they will tell you that recent events have shaken them up.
Our fears often run ahead of reality. We've seen panics that really weren't supported by data many times in the last half a century – in sometimes serious and sometimes humorous ways.
The percentage of Americans who say airline travel is safe has dropped from 71% in 2024 to 64% in February 2025, according to an AP-NORC Center poll. Those who say it is unsafe has risen from 12% to 20%.
We see the same thing in Google search data: Searches for 'is flying safe' have reached their second-highest level of all time. The only time it was higher was in March 2020, when people were worried about traveling during the Covid-19 pandemic.
We don't know yet whether the current fears will result in fewer people flying, but it wouldn't surprise me if it did.
Look at what happened in the wake of the 9/11 attacks: After the number of flyers increased throughout the 1990s and into 2000, the number of airline passengers dropped in 2001 and 2002. This decline may very well have been exacerbated by another airplane crash in November 2001.
It appears that many of these passengers who decided not to travel by plane did so by car instead. This caused car fatalities to rise - beyond the expected number of fatalities if airline and car travel levels remained at their normal levels.
But, as it turned out, the period after 2001 was one of the safest on record for flying. American airports now have more security screenings and identification checks, and there have been no more deadly terrorist attacks on US airplanes since 9/11. Fewer airline fatalities overall were recorded in the 10-year period after 2001 than any previously on record.
When I had a conversation with CNN host Michael Smerconish this past weekend, he and I pointed out a number of other instances where beliefs ran ahead of the data and sometimes caused massive changes in behavior.
Interestingly, the attacks of 9/11 kicked another story out of the news: 'Summer of the Shark.' The media hyped up shark attacks after a few happened during the summer of 2001. News story after news story led some in the media to chastise people who wanted to enjoy the beach that summer.
These high-profile attacks, as it turns out, were not representative of growing danger.Fewer people were attacked or died by sharks in 2001 than the prior year.
Last fall, the biggest story was lots of unidentified drones flying the skies of New Jersey. More than five times as many people searched for drones on Google in December than any month since Google started tracking searches back in 2004.
Everyone seemed worried that something bad was going on, but that was based on basically nothing. I even did a television segment on drones in which I basically said we knew nothing. As it turns out, no one ever proved that something nefarious was going on. The federal government ended up saying any additional drones were authorized by the FAA.
We don't even know if there were really more drones in the skies or people were just more active in trying to look for them.
The drone story, unlike the others mentioned, was mostly harmless. I'm not quite sure it measures up to what happened in 1973 and 1974, however.
The king of late-night television, Johnny Carson, went on air December 19, 1973, and talked about 'an acute shortage of toilet paper in the good old United States. We gotta quit writing on it!'
Carson was reacting to a report from Wisconsin Rep. Harold Froehlich who had said, 'The U.S. may face a serious shortage of toilet paper within a few months… It is a problem that will potentially touch every American…'
Here was the thing: There was no toilet paper shortage. Froehlich was talking about the potential for one. Most other media, besides Carson, really didn't pick up on the story.
But at a time when there were other shortages in the country (e.g. oil), people took Carson's words to heart.
The result was that stores started rationing toilet paper. The cause, as Walter Cronkite reported at the time: 'unfounded rumors of a shortage has caused excessive demand at retail outlets.'
Eventually, things got bad enough that Carson went on the air to tell Americans that there was, in fact, no shortage. Things got back to normal when Americans, too, realized there was no shortage.
The situation with flying currently is obviously more serious than toilet paper. Still, it's a good reminder that we sometimes let our emotions get ahead of the data.