The Joy of Air Travel?There are few manmade events more majestic than watching a 747 jumbo jet takeoff. To see something that large leave the ground and soar into the sky always makes me smile. I can’t wait until my children are a little older and I can take them to the airport to watch the planes. Just sit there at LAX and think about how all those passengers will be scattered over the globe in a few hours.
They say that air travel is the safest form of transportation, and that I’m far more likely to be injured in the drive home than on the flight to the airport. Statistically, this is clearly true. Most passenger aircraft built fly for 15 or 20 years every day and retire with a spotless record. Even the oldest jet, the Boeing 707, has had only 30 major crashes since entering service in 1958.
But with the recent tragedy with the Gulf Air Airbus 320 in August, all my usual fears of air travel come back. Actually, I’m sort of in the middle in my family. Intellectually, I know how safe I am on a plane, and so I am calm on the surface but a little tense still underneath. My brother used to be a commuter airline pilot in Florida, and he has no fear of flying at all. He was even on a Concorde flight a week before the Air France disaster. My wife on the other hand couldn’t be happier if she never had to fly again. She has her eyes closed, a sick feeling in the stomach, a tight grip on my hand, and repeats “Bismillah…” in her mind as the plane rolls down the runway.
From a safety standpoint, the vast majority of accidents occur on takeoff and landing and are usually due to some kind of human mistake. Planes for the most part don’t just fall from the sky. That’s what makes the most recent spate of accidents so puzzling. In the case of Gulf Air, the plane was in fact attempting to land, although it seems likely it was a pilot error of some kind. The plane had already missed the runway on two approaches and was circling back for a third when it plunged into the sea. There was never any radio report of a problem with the aircraft prior to the plunge.
But the last several major accidents in the United States all involved aircraft at or near cruising altitude. TWA Flight 800 blew out its center fuel tank after vapors ignited by a short circuit in 1996. Two years ago, a Swissair MD-11 caught fire in flight and the cockpit became disabled resulting in a crash off Canada. There was also the recent Alaska Airlines crash of an MD-80 with a worn jackscrew that controlled the stabilizer off Los Angeles.
And the most puzzling is the unexplained crash of an EgyptAir 767 out of New York last year. American investigators have been convinced that it was a case of the co-pilot committing an intentional murder-suicide, as he supposedly put the plane into a controlled dive into the sea. Egypt has rejected this but has not been able to come up with an alternate explanation. If Egypt is right, the blame would then fall on Boeing, while if the NTSB is correct, then the Egyptian co-pilot, and by extension Egypt, is to blame. I have read the cockpit voice recorder transcripts (translated into English of course, much of the conversation is in Arabic) and certainly the behavior of the co-pilot is rather odd. On the other hand, there is no credible motive for why he would have been suicidal, and in such a dramatic fashion. We will probably never know for sure what happened.
What does happen in most accidents is human action, either error, or terrorism of some sort. In fact, the first airplane to be brought down by a bomb was a Continental Airline 707 flying over Missouri in 1962. The biggest bomb attack was the crash of an Air India 747 near Ireland in 1985. Probably a Sikh group was behind that. The airplanes themselves are actually very reliable. Of the three new designs Boeing has put out over the last 15 years, the 757, 767, and 777, only a single airplane has crashed due to mechanical failure. Pilots, and air traffic control, are now the weak links in air safety. Knowing this, the FAA and the US commercial airlines invest heavily in pilot and air traffic control training.
Does this mean we should avoid airlines of Third World countries? Is it safe to fly PIA? The short answer is yes, it is safe. PIA does not have a spotless record, with a total of 10 major plane crashes since the 1950’s. But only two major jet crashes have occurred. In 1979, at Ta’if, Saudi Arabia, a PIA 707 crashed killing all aboard. A fire had broken out in the rear of the passenger cabin and quickly disabled the aircraft. I could not find any report on the cause of that fire. In 1992, a PIA Airbus 300 flew into a mountain on approach to Katmandu, Nepal. The pilots had gotten disoriented and there was no room for error when flying in the Himalayas.
The real problem in the last accident, and in Third World countries in general, is that the air traffic control is not as sophisticated. A better system would have notified the PIA crew they were off course and kept them out of trouble. The terrible accident in 1996 out of New Delhi with a Saudia 747 was also due to lack of modern equipment. The Saudia jet had taken off and was climbing while a Kazakh transport on approach was descending. The Kazakh pilot descended 1000 feet too much resulting in a mid-air collision. A modern air system would have alerted Delhi airport of the Kazakh mistake before it had gone too far.
Jet travel is one of the major wonders of the modern world. Without it, many of us would never have left Pakistan. But despite its statistical safety, air crashes still have the power to grab your attention and raise your anxiety about flying. With the continued growth of air travel all over the world, air crashes are going to be more common. Even if the accident rate doesn’t change, the number of major air disasters will climb from 2 or 3 a year to perhaps one a month. The flying public will be put to the test when it sees crashes that often on the front pages of the world newspapers.
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