irline travel requires passengers to make a leap of faith, entrusting their lives to pilots, airlines, air traffic controllers and others who regulate air travel.
Even after a week of multiple tragedies in worldwide aviation, ‘‘There isn’t much that we can do to manipulate how we fly as passengers. But we also shouldn’t worry too much,’’ says Phil Derner, founder of the aviation enthusiast website NYC Aviation.
With one passenger plane being shot out of the sky and two crashing during storms, aviation experts said there was no pattern suggesting a huge gap in airline safety measures.
Less than 1 in 2 million flights last year ended in an accident that damaged a plane beyond repair, according to the International Air Transport Association. The statistic includes accidents involving cargo and charter airlines as well as scheduled passenger airline flights. This week’s aviation disasters have the potential to push airline fatalities this year to over 700 deaths — the most since 2010. And 2014 is still barely half over.
The misfortunes began July 18 when Malaysia Flight 17 was shot down over eastern Ukraine with 298 people on board. It’s still uncertain who fired the missile that destroyed the plane, but Ukrainian officials have blamed ethnic Russian rebels, and US officials have pointed to circumstantial evidence that suggests that may be the case.
Global aviation leaders will meet in Montreal this week to initiate discussions on a plan to address safety and security issues raised by the shoot-down of the Malaysia Airlines jet, an aviation official said. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to discuss the issue publicly by name.
The shoot-down doubled Malaysia Airlines’ losses this year. The mysterious disappearance of Malaysia Flight 370 with 239 people on board in March combined with the destruction of Flight 17 amount to more than twice the total global airline fatalities in all of last year, which was the industry’s safest year on record. Ascend, a global aviation industry consulting firm headquartered in London, counts 163 fatalities in 2013 involving passenger-carrying airliners with 14 seats or more.
On Wednesday, a TransAsia Airways plane crashed in Taiwan in stormy weather trailing a typhoon, killing 48 passengers, injuring 10 passengers and crew members, and injuring five more people on the ground.
The next day an Air Algerie flight with 116 passengers and crew disappeared in a rainstorm over Mali while en route from Burkina Faso to Algeria’s capital. The plane’s wreckage was later found near Mali’s border with Burkina Faso. The plane was operated for the airline by Swiftair, a Spanish carrier.
For all that is out of the passengers’ control, though, there are still steps that travelers can take to be well informed, select solid airlines and practice good safety habits.
(The Boston Globe)
