I was flying to Melbourne, Fla., on my way to Cape Canaveral to cover the Challenger story. 

As my plane, a Delta DC-9 with news personnel from all over the country aboard, flew directly over the launch pad from which the Challenger had lifted off barely four hours earlier, I said to a colleague next to me: 

"As nervous as flying makes me, I guess the chances of a commercial air crash are fairly unlikely this close to the Cape and this soon after the Challenger." 

I often say things like that when I fly. Somebody told me it was called "positive rationalization." 

We were on final approach into the Melbourne airport. We were at perhaps 600 feet. I glanced to my left out the window and to my horror, I saw a small aircraft coming directly at me. 

Later, the person sitting next to me told me I had said, "Oh, my God!" 

The Delta pilot swerved violently to the right to avoid a collision with the single-engine plane. A subsequent FAA investigation indicated the student pilot of the small plane had been in error and that the two planes had passed each other at only 100 feet. 

Oh, my God. 

Airplanes are showing an alarming tendency to run into one another, or nearly miss running into one another lately. 
 

Figures can't calm me
 

Still, there are all the figures and all the arguments regarding how safe flying is despite the recent increases in collisions and near- misses. 

But that doesn't make me any less nervous when I'm landing in a jet and I know there are student pilots, private pilots who may or may not be very good at flying an airplane, and who knows what else might be out there with which my plane could collide. 

Add to that the fact that air traffic controllers are said to be short on numbers and, in some cases, experience, and the Greyhound starts looking better and better. 

I was in a private pilot's office some years ago. I never will forget the photo on his wall. It showed a single-engine plane that had crashed into a tree. Said the immortal words across the photograph: "Aviation in itself is inherently safe, but in many ways, it can be less forgiving of human error than the sea." 

Statistics. You can have them, especially after I read the following, a National Transportation Safety Board report in Aviation News concerning a 1986 crash of a private plane in Nevada that killed a man and a woman:" 

"Investigators said lab tests showed the pilot's blood alcohol level was 0.18 . . . and the level of the female passenger was 0.14. In most states, drivers are considered intoxicated at a level of 0.10. 

"Local authorities removed the bodies from the wreckage. Investigators said local police reported that, as evidenced by the positions of the bodies at the moment of impact and certain injuries to the pilot, the passenger was performing an act of . . . " 

Oh, my God.