Lessons
Aviation Accidents
by
, 09-13-2012 at 12:04 AM (5696 Views)
You might think this is a fairly morbid way to start proceedings and I suppose you'd be right but I've always had a weird fascination with aviation incidents/crashes. I am no frequent flyer nor am I a fearful one but the fact remains that the modern plane is both a marvellous piece of engineering genius, and a dangerous piece of machinery when mistreated or not maintained correctly. I've spent maybe hundreds of hours online and researching documentary evidence to try to understand when something goes wrong, why it goes wrong. Human error, improper maintenance, autopilot malfunction.. these are usually the main attributes to an incident.
But let me stress - the chance of an any-scale emergency in a commercial flight is incredibly remote. Ignore the 1:11m that you read because this equation is not only false, but works off some very outdated statistics. Basically commercial airliners have more stringent safety guidelines to follow year upon year and especially those that focus on metal fatigue and long haul flights. It's true that an incident is more likely on a long haul than short, but the odds are still over 1 in 9 million, especially as this takes into account even minor incidents such as localized decompression. Factually speaking, fatalistic incidents are dropping at a steady rate and have been since 1989 - sadly not taking into account the four planes that were hijacked in 2001 but then those are considered in a special category.
The prevailing pattern that emerges on airlines that do have poor safety and crash records is that they are usually cheaper budget carriers. It's not a myth. But I'm not talking about Ryanair or EasyJet or JetStar etc. I'm referring to usually Arabic or African budget airlines. For example, of the seven incidents that have occurred this year, only one happened in Europe. It's estimated that worldwide there's approximately anywhere from 12 to 14 million flights a year, so using that data we can assume that there has been roughly 9-10 million already. That's about one in a million and the planes involved had no mechanical issues aside from Bhoja Air Flight 213 which had been declared not airworthy to begin with. If it seems high then bear in mind that in Europe and the USA, the odds decrease significantly. The one incident this year was in Russia, where plane safety has been under scrutiny with a number of mechanical failures and crashes over the last few years to begin with.
What I've learned from reading into the worst crashes (and by that I mean fatalistic) is that it takes extreme circumstances to floor a plane and human error is almost always some part of the incident. The three worst air disasters by death toll were in Tenerife in 1977 when two planes collided on the runway, a Japan Airlines flight in 1985 where improper maintenance on a bulkhead resulted in a rapid decompression and destabilization of the plane coupled with the loss of the vertical stabilizer, and a midair collision between an Indian and Kazakhstan aircraft in 1996. All were avoidable.
All told though, air travel is astonishingly safe. Just don't skimp on the cost of your ticket unless it's a short trip!
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