In the summer of 2014, we were preoccupied with airline crashes.

Earlier in the year, Malaysian flight 370 disappeared on its way to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur

and led to a gazillion hours of speculation on CNN and other cable channels, but mainly CNN.

Giant floor maps. Big fake airplanes.

Little fake airplanes.

Holographic airplanes.

No airplane detail left unspoken.

Then in July, another Malaysian Airlines flight,

MH17 also met a tragic end. A Malaysian Airlines flight, MH17 also met a tragic end.

A Malaysian Airlines flight with about 295 people on board has crashed, we are told, from reports in Reuters and Interfax.

This happened in Ukraine near the Russian border.

The plane had taken off from Amsterdam on its way to Kuala Lumpur,

but while flying over Ukraine, it suddenly disappeared from air traffic control radar.

At the time, Ukraine was mired in conflict with Russia, and months later,

it was confirmed that the airline had been shot out of the sky by a Russian missile.

Also, that summer, investigators from France and the UN were searching the north of Mali

for the wreckage of an Air Algerie flight that crashed carrying 116 people.

Since the news that summer was filled with havoc from the heavens, we decided to offer

a breaking news consumer's guide for plane crashes. James Fallows is a national correspondent for the

Atlantic, and it turns out a pilot. My first question for him was about pointing fingers, mainly at the aviation authorities.

Precisely because commercial airline crashes are so rare.

Most of the time it's something that nobody has thought of because all the normal predictable threats people have figured out.

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