Aviation safety

By all accounts, 2014 was a nightmare year for civil aviation. There have been several high profile air accidents during this year. The disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH 370 on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing (on March 8, 2014) is the biggest ever mystery in civil aviation. Not even a trace of the Boeing 777 plane or the 239 passengers and crew has been found to date after nine months of extensive searches in the region where it was presumed to have vanished. There have been previous cases of complete disappearances of aircraft, but not on this scale.

The other major incident also involved, tragically, another Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777-200 plane. MH 17 flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur with 283 passengers and 15 crew was shot down over Ukraine by a missile fired by a yet-unidentified group on July 17, 2014. In this particular instance, most, if not all, bodies were recovered and the wreckage was found.

It was somewhat difficult to access the site due to the conflict raging in the area, but European and Malaysian investigators were finally able to investigate the crash on the site itself.

The MH 17 relatives did have some sort of closure unlike the MH 370 relatives who live in agony and despair but with a very faint glimmer of hope.

A major plane crash took place in Africa just one week later, on July 24. 2014. An Air Algerie McDonnell Douglas MD 83 aircraft (flight number AH 5017) flying from Burkina Faso to Algeria crashed in Mali, killing all 110 passengers and six crew on board.

The cause of the crash is not yet exactly known, but bad weather is said to have been a cause, based on air-to-ground communications. The black boxes have been recovered and are being analysed.

The other major crash of 2014 happened just last week - an Air Asia Airbus 320 (flight number QZ 8501) crashed shortly after take-off on a flight from Surabaya in Indonesia to Changi in Singapore. Wreckage of the plane and some of the bodies of the 162 passengers and crew were being recovered from the Java Sea at the time of going to press. Bad weather is widely believed to have played a part in the crash.

This was Air Asia’s first-ever fatal crash. Having learnt vital lessons from the MH 370 tragedy, Air Asia CEO Tony Fernandez and the Indonesian Government took swift measures to keep the relatives and the press informed of all developments related to the incident. Just a day after, a Virgin Atlantic Boeing which had landing gear trouble escaped by a whisker.

There were several other crashes during the year. An Antonov AN-32 belonging to the Sri Lanka Air Force crashed in Hokandara, killing all SLAF personnel on board. Bad weather is attributed as a cause. There were several other, military aviation incidents, the biggest one being the crash of the Algerian Air Force Lockheed C-130 Hercules on February 11, 2014 which killed 77 people.

TransAsia Airways Flight 222 (GE222/TNA222) was a scheduled domestic passenger flight that crashed into buildings during approach to land in bad weather at Magong Airport, Penghu Island, Taiwan, on July 23, 2014. The plane was an ATR 72-500. Out of the 54 passengers and crew, 10 survived.

A Nepal Airways flight crashed in Nepal on February 16, 2014, killing all 18 people on board. Sepahan Airlines Flight 5915 was a scheduled domestic passenger flight from Tehran to Tabas which crashed shortly after take-off falling into a residential area. Of the 40 passengers and eight crew on board, 39 people died. There were a few other fatal civil and military aviation incidents during the year and a near miss over the skies of Sweden, which makes it one of the worst years for aviation.

Still, flying is one of the safest modes of transport. You are indeed more likely to die in a traffic accident than in a plane crash. Every day, almost 13,000 civil and military planes including private business jets take to the air and land without a hitch. But it can be made safer still by spending a little more on technology, security and training. Indeed, that is exactly what plane manufacturers (primarily Airbus Industrie and Boeing), the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) and the airline industry must do at this juncture.

For example, both MH 370 and QZ 8501 did not have the real-time GPS tracking technology which could have made finding the wreckage easier. In future, all planes must be equipped with this device and even the existing planes can be retrofitted. It has also been argued that flight data could be streamed to the ground in real time rather than being stored in a “Black Box’, which is common parlance for Flight Data Recorder/Cockpit Voice Recorder.

This does mean the transmission of a huge amount of data from the thousands of planes in the sky at any given moment, but it is technologically possible and it will enable investigators to know what has happened to a crashed plane or a plane in trouble almost instantly.

There is another suggestion to install real-time CCTV cameras in the cockpit, but most pilots are averse to the “Big Brother” idea which could compromise their privacy. On the plus side, this will help experts to know exactly what has gone wrong in the cockpit if the plane crashes.

A few airlines do have CCTV cameras in the passenger cabin after the events of 9/11 to check for suspicious passenger activity, but these do not beam images to the ground in real time.

Another fancy idea is to enable remote piloting of aircraft whose pilots become incapable of manning the controls due to some reason such as passing out. Improvements to navigation, better access to the latest weather information, designing aircraft with material that are resistant to ice and improved pilot training have also been cited as factors that can improve safety. It is vital now to improve passenger confidence in the industry after the tragic events of 2014.