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Reports of harrowing and sometimes tragic incidents on planes have accelerated this year, leaving many people wondering if it’s safe to fly.
A door plug exploded on an Alaska Airlines jet, leaving a large hole in the fuselage of the Boeing 737 Max. Passengers’ cell phones and clothes were ripped from their bodies, and they were left in the darkness as their oxygen masks fell, and the plane fortunately landed without serious injuries.
Another Boeing plane crashed violently, throwing passengers onto the cabin ceiling and leaving dozens with serious injuries that required hospitalization upon landing.
A passenger plane collided with a military plane at a Tokyo airport, killing five Japan Coast Guard employees who were responding to the earthquake.
There were also smaller accidents, including a 200-pound wheel falling from the plane during takeoff and crushing a vehicle parked on the ground. Another plane’s engine caught fire. The jet arrived at the airport, but the missing panel was discovered. All of these incidents have given the Kardashians the attention they deserve on social media.
However, the question of whether it is safe to fly is not so easy to answer.
The simple answer is that flying is safe, safer than most forms of travel, and much safer than most people mindlessly getting into a car every day.
“Arriving at the airport and getting into the pressurized tube is the safest part of the journey,” said Anthony Brickhouse, a crash investigator and professor of aviation safety at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. “The drive to the airport was more dangerous.”
But it’s also true that the American airline industry’s near-perfect safety record has remained intact through sheer luck.
Since January 2009, when a regional jet crashed in Buffalo, New York, killing 49 passengers and one person on the ground, only five other people have died in scheduled commercial flight accidents in the United States.
- In 2013, an Asiana Airlines jet crashed short of the runway in San Francisco, killing three passengers.
- A Southwest Airlines passenger died in 2018 when the engine cover collapsed and the window next to him was shattered.
- Passengers are In 2019, a man died when his small plane skidded off the runway in rural Alaska.
By comparison, from 2003 to 2022, the most recent year for which full-year traffic fatalities are available, an average of more than 100 people died each day on American roads and highways. This means, on average, about the same number of people died on roads and highways every hour as died in U.S. commercial airline crashes over a 15-year period.
Carlos Avila Gonzalez/San Francisco Chronicle/Getty Images/File
The destroyed fuselage of Asiana Airlines Flight 214, which crashed and burst into flames on landing, is seen on the runway at San Francisco International Airport, Saturday, July 6, 2013.
However, other forms of flight are not as safe.
Since 2009, nearly 300 people have died while traveling on “on-demand” air services such as private jets. Nearly 5,500 people died in general aviation, small planes often flown by amateur pilots.
Civil aviation has the safest record of any mode of transport, while rail is the second safest.
From 2009 to last year, 71 passengers died on commuter trains and Amtrak trains.but Passenger trains travel far fewer miles than airplanes or cars. vehicle.
It is clear that traveling by ground is much more dangerous than flying on a US commercial airline, given the much longer distances traveled by plane.
View this interactive content on CNN.com
Ed Pearson, director of the Aviation Safety Foundation and a vocal critic of Boeing, said he is aware of the statistics but still refuses to fly the Boeing 737 Max due to concerns about the struggling aircraft maker’s quality control. He said he was deaf. Family does that. He was surprised to learn that he was on that particular model of plane, and he even got off the Max just before departure.
Still, Pearson said he would like to fly on most planes, even more. older Boeing model.
“Even if you take Max out of the equation, (flight) has proven to be fairly safe,” he said.
Unfortunately, recent safety performance does not guarantee future safety.
Despite recent criticism of all three groups, the U.S. air travel industry’s nearly zero-fatality record is due in part to the efforts of aviation authorities, airlines, and aircraft manufacturers.
But mainly it was sheer luck. In both cases, the outcome could have been much worse had things gone just a little differently.
The Alaska Airlines plane that lost the door plug had been flying for more than two months without the four bolts needed to keep the door plug in place, the National Transportation Safety Board said.
It made 153 flights before blowing a door plug at 16,000 feet. Of those flights, 22 were between Hawaii and the mainland.
If the door blows out at the normal cruising altitude of 35,000 feet or over the Pacific Ocean several hours away from the nearest airport, or if the plug flies straight back and hits the tail of the plane causing damage, the door probably blew out. It is possible that The accident killed the aircraft and 177 passengers and crew.
And it’s not the biggest break. A year ago, the aviation safety debate wasn’t focused on Boeing aircraft. At domestic airports, near-misses occurred one after another on the runways, and collisions that were narrowly avoided were reported one after another.
On February 4, 2023, a FedEx jet came within 150 feet of a runway, but the pilot noticed a Southwest plane taking off from the same runway. This was one of five accidents narrowly avoided in just seven weeks early last year.
And none of them were as potentially serious as another incident in July 2017. An Air Canada plane, piloted by a captain who had been awake for more than 19 hours, was about to land on a taxiway at San Francisco International Airport, which was packed with three wide-body planes. Passengers were waiting for takeoff.
The NTSB later determined that the Air Canada plane returned to within 100 feet of the ground and took off again without making contact with the airliner on the ground. Safety regulators said more than 1,000 people on board the four planes could have died had the accident not been averted at the last minute.
“It was probably the worst disaster in aviation history,” Brickhouse said. “Pilots, air traffic controllers, mechanics, they’re all humans, and humans make mistakes. We need systems that allow us to recover from mistakes when they happen so that they don’t turn into tragedies.” I have been working on the design.”
But Pearson said the system is in an unprecedented situation. Regulators, airlines and aircraft manufacturers like Boeing need to make changes.
“I think the system is under tremendous stress,” he said. “There is a shortage of air traffic control personnel, pilots, maintenance personnel, and manufacturing personnel.”
What worries Pearson most is the attitude that the apparent safety of America’s aviation system means nothing needs to be improved.
“There’s a sense of overconfidence,” he says. “The gold standard is collapsing because we downplay everything and keep talking about how secure the system is. That’s not the right way of thinking. That’s the kind of thinking that gets people killed.”
Brickhouse believes the planes currently in use are safe. He said the drama of the Alaska Airlines incident, even though it shouldn’t have happened, has drawn attention to a series of other events that do not pose a serious threat in and of themselves.
“The airline industry holds safety events all the time. It’s not an indictment of the airline industry,” he said. “But after Alaska Airlines, it snowballed and everyone became hypersensitive.”
in spite of Brickhouse said he has more confidence in the system’s safety than Pearson and has no intention of firing people who are scared to fly right now or who want to avoid planes like the 737 Max. . And he has his own concerns, including the number of narrowly averted accidents at the country’s airports.
“I don’t believe in luck, but we are lucky that these incidents did not turn into disasters,” he said. “If it tends to keep happening, you should focus on fixing it.”
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