Air safety in 2018: should we be concerned about
flying?
2017 was a spotless year for commercial travel, so why
has 2018 started off so badly?
This photo provided by Mizan News Agency, shows
the the wreckage of a Turkish private jet that crashed on Sunday in the Zagros
Mountains, outside of the city of Shahr-e Kord in Iran. Asal Bigdeli / Mizan
News Agency via AP.
Almost 200 people have been killed in a spate of
passenger plane crashes in the first three months of this year, after a
fatality-free 2017 for commercial jets.
While it's impossible to draw
comparisons to any of the recent aviation accidents, questions have naturally
resurfaced over air safety and why it's been such a bad start to 2018 for
flying.
It's not easy coming off the back of what seems like an anomaly
for the industry: a year without a single commercial passenger jet fatality,
making it the safest on record for commercial air travel.
But does the
question need to be posed? Is air safety suddenly regressing?
Luckily,
the answer seems to be no. Air travel remains the safest mode of transport in
the world, and aviation experts are quick to put paid to any comparisons between
separate crashes.
By the numbers
Since January, there have been
four major commercial jet crashes, with 196 people killed between them. That
number might have doubled had the year's first crash resulted in
fatalities.
- January 13: Pegasus Airlines Flight 8622 skidded off the
end of the runway at Trabzon Airport, Turkey and came to rest on a cliff. All
168 passengers and crew survived without any injuries, and instead the most
notable thing to come out of the potential disaster was a spectacular picture
which quickly went viral.
A Pegasus Airlines Boing 737 passenger plane is
seen struck in mud on an embankment, a day after skidding off the airstrip,
after landing at Trabzon's airport on the Black Sea coast on January 14, 2018.
A passenger plane late on January skidded off the runway just
metres away from the sea as it landed at Trabzon's airport in northern Turkey.
The Pegasus Airlines flight, with 168 people on board, had taken off from Ankara
on its way to the northern province of Trabzon. No casualties were
reported. / AFP
- February 18: Iran Aseman Airlines Flight 3704
crashed into the Zagros Mountains in Iran, killing all 60 passengers, two
security guards, two flight attendants and a pilot and co-pilot.
- March
12: US-Bangla Airlines Flight 211, on an international flight from Dhaka to
Nepal, crashed at Tribhuvan International Airport, Kathmandu. At least 49
people, of the 71 onboard, died.
This only refers to aircraft that weigh
over 5700kg, which is an International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO)
weight-defined limit.
But there have also been a number of smaller
crashes, which resulted in many fatalities. Not least Sunday's crash, which
killed wealthy Turkish socialite and business heir Mina Basaran, 28, her seven
friends and three crew members when a private plane travelling from Sharjah to
Istanbul crashed in Iran.
On March 6, a Russian transport plane crashed
in Syria, killing all 32 people on board, and on March 12, a helicopter carrying
six people crashed in New York City's East River, killing all passengers, while
the pilot survived.
Remains of Bangladesh's US-Bangla Flight BS211
lies on the ground as a plane takes off from Tribhuvan International Airport in
Kathmandu, Nepal, Tuesday, March 13, 2018. The plane, which was coming from
Bangladesh, was flying low and erratically before striking the ground and
erupting in flames on Monday. US-Bangla Airlines Flight BS211 from Dhaka to
Kathmandu was carrying 67 passengers and four crew members.
Capt
Darren Straker, former Chief Air Accident Investigator at UAE's General Civil
Aviation Authority (GCAA) and independent investigator at Straker System Safety,
claimed there was a common theme in some of the commercial airline crashes: an
"attributable cause based on human error".
"A bad start to the year? Yes,
but I think last year was the aberration, the system is now back to accidents
and operational liabilities," he said.
"Despite the ICAO accident data
trend decreasing for several years, the alarming increase in accidents where no
technical cause has been prioritised, indicates that that the systemic
underlying causes are still prevalent in accident causation."
The Pegasus
Airlines flight was likely an engine or thrust problem, he said, and the Saratov
Airlines flight had been caused by ice covering the speed sensors as the heaters
were not turned on, despite it being the middle of winter.
The Iran
Aseman Airlines, and US-Bangla crash were also avoidable, Mr Straker
said.
On Monday, US-Bangla's chief executive Imran Asif said there had
been a "fumble from the control tower" as the plane approached the airport's
single runway.
Recordings of the conversation between air traffic control
and the pilot appear to indicate confusion over which end of Kathmandu airport's
single runway the plane was to approach.
"Kathmandu, well Nepal as a
country, is on the ICAO blacklist as it has failed so many audits - it cannot
recover without significant investment in infrastructure," Mr Straker
said.
"A renewed and dedicated effort inline with the ICAO initiative 'No
country left behind' can bring support and much needed expertise to countries
without the effective infrastructure to support a fully enabled safety
investigation process, increasing regional safety and oversight in regions where
infrastructure and expertise are at a premium."
However, Saj Ahmad, chief
analyst at StrategicAero Research, said it was "totally wrong to wonder why one
year has had successive incidents and previous years may not have had
any".
"Equally, it's unfair and irresponsible to try and connect [the
crashes] in any way at all either and air transport remains by far and away the
single most safest method of travel in the world".
He said pilots
regularly trained for different scenarios, and accidents happened in unknown
quantities. The flight paths from the UAE to Turkey, over Iran, are well-used as
the most efficient air corridor for that region, he said, and also helped to
avoid airspace around Iraq and Syria.
"Human error is always possible,
and it has happened in various crashes - but the events of 2018 are still under
investigation and nothing is clear about any of the crashes yet let alone pilot
error being a factor," Mr Ahmad said.
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