I think it's more about a fascination with a puzzle that is very difficult to solve. 200+ don't normally die at once without any explanation as to root cause.
It's not the number of people - modern aircraft are built to be extremely airworthy, and if a plane goes down, it means that many things at once went terribly wrong in a very unprobable sequence.
I don't know about you, but yes, I've read railway accident post-mortems before.
We have sort of a professional interest here. We may not all be airline avionics engineers... we may not be any of us airline avionics engineers... but the failure of complicated systems is certainly something we all have to deal with, hacker or startup founder, and learning about them is not time wasted.
If most of the train ends up either floating in the ocean or a couple miles under the surface, you would, at least, have a very interesting trainwreck.
The fact that it's a rare and big occurence makes it newsworthy. It plays to a lot of peoples natural fear of flying[1] which makes the story that much better. The fact that a lot of people usually get killed helps too. Even though it's a rare event it seems like it happens all the time, simply because it's a major worldwide newsstory every single time. This tricks people into believing that flying is unsafe - they constantly see newsstories and documentaries about people who have died in an air crash.
People are afraid of sharks for much the same reason, even though your chance of being devoured by a shark is significantly smaller than the chance of falling down the stairs and dying
[1] This natural fear could well be rooted in the evolutionary advantage of being scared when you are up high looking down. The ones that weren't scared fell off the cliff and died.
I'm fascinated by all aspects of aviation, as a pilot (private, low-time) and a software designer. Aviation has a lot in common with software design. Computer systems would be much better if we made them with the same attention to priorities that aircraft designers have - keep it simple, make it easy to maintain, treat control systems as an extension of human behavior, use redundancy in mission-critical subsystems, and build testing and error reporting in from the beginning. Did this crash happen because of some edge case that wasn't covered by the unit tests? Aircraft and software designers both want to maximize uptime but aircraft designers are fanatical about it.
I think it's about the primal fascination with ways you might be killed. I think it this is a primal response to a category of information and the news essentially exploits it. I think some part of the brain perks up at "new danger" and is fascinated/captivated by it.
I think the investigation stories are supported by interest in the original crash. I think the same thing about the "X attacks and or kills person" stories and the rest of the "person killed in X odd circumstance stories".
That, and a reaction to the unknown. Accidents of unknown cause are naturally much more interesting than well-understood ones - and airline accidents, as a rule, tend to be much more mysterious than car/train accidents.
Not at all : pilots are so busy trying to get the aircraft under control they may not have had time to issue a Mayday. We don't know the time period between loss of control and impact, we don't know much at all.
People should know by now that air travel is much safer than car travel, so this won't affect their safety in any tangible way.
Perhaps this is more about a fascination with flight? Most people would like to learn to fly if they could?