The gradual nature of the disaster was also more comforting, in some respects, compared with the nature of modern technological failures such as air crashes. Time's reviewer made this point explicitly: "This air age, when death comes too swiftly for heroism or with no survivors to record it, can still turn with wonder to an age before yesterday when a thousand deaths at sea seemed the very worst the world must suffer."[15] It was, as Steven Biel comments, "a quainter kind of disaster" in which the victims had time to prepare and chose how to die.[14]