  The Internet not only has changed the dynamics of our collective attention,
but also through the transactional log of online activities, provides us with
the opportunity to study attention dynamics at scale. In this paper, we
particularly study attention to aircraft incidents and accidents using
Wikipedia transactional data in two different language editions, English and
Spanish. We study both the editorial activities on and the viewership of the
articles about airline crashes. We analyse how the level of attention is
influenced by different parameters such as number of deaths, airline region,
and event locale and date. We find evidence that the attention given by
Wikipedia editors to pre-Wikipedia aircraft incidents and accidents depends on
the region of the airline for both English and Spanish editions. North American
airline companies receive more prompt coverage in English Wikipedia. We also
observe that the attention given by Wikipedia visitors is influenced by the
airline region but only for events with high number of deaths. Finally we show
that the rate and time span of the decay of attention is independent of the
number of deaths and a fast decay within about a week seems to be universal. We
discuss the implications of these findings in the context of attention bias.
