Our world has changed. I'm not sure why we ever thought our technology was infallible or that we were invulnerable to attack, but now we know otherwise. We know that catastrophic failure is just a matter of statistics: if you do something dangerous enough times, something will go wrong and people will be killed. This is a very sad and humbling realization.

I am reminded of an article by William Langewiesche in the Atlantic from '98 examining the lessons of the ValuJet crash:

Like NASA before the Challenger accident, the FAA needed to listen to the opinions and worries of its own lower-level employees. But there are limits to all this, too. When, at a post-crash press conference in Miami, a reporter asked Robert Francis, of the NTSB, "Shouldn't the government protect us against this kind of thing?" the best answer would have been "It cannot, and never will."

....It would be wrong to conclude that we should join the alarmists in their prophesies of doom. Flying will remain safe, and for conventional reasons, including the admirable reaction we have seen to the ValuJet crash. But it should also be clear that there are structural limits to flight safety, and that any dream of a zero-accident future is probably about as realistic as the old ValuJet promise to put safety first. If that is true, we had better get used to it. Conventional accidents — those I call procedural or engineered — will submit to our solutions, but as air travel continues to expand, we can expect capricious system accidents to blossom. Understanding why might keep us from making the system even more complex, and therefore perhaps more dangerous, too.