Safety in the air

Posted on February 8, 2008
Filed Under Travel |

It would be rather eerie to write an article about safety in the air, while I am in the air. Every week I am in the air, and I keep thinking how safe are we in the hands of two people manning the aircraft and a bunch of Air Traffic Controllers (ATCs) who keep navigating the Captain and Pilot with various information related to latitute, longitude, altitude.

Airline Safety

I was amongst the lucky few, I guess, who got to hear how the ATCs navigate the aircraft. It was great to know that it is not just the 2 in the cockpit who do the controlling and in whose hands our lives depend. I may be sounding very cynical in a jet age or in a technological world, where we have A380 with its fully computerised cockpit and double decker seating, where we have Boeing’s Dreamliner set to be launched early next year. The fact of the matter is we are all human beings and as the saying goes ‘To err is human’.

The reason all this comes to my mind is because I happened to read an article about the safety in regional air carriers, in yesterday’s edition of USA Today. There have been instances when the captain and/or the pilots have gone to sleep while in the air and this can be attributed to too much flying causing fatigue, etc. With so much pressure in air travel and very few qualified pilots on the market, handful of pilots are forced to fly more than their stipulated hours. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is very much aware of this lapse, and I think they are doing their best to pull the reins and penalise the airlines.

There has been only 1 major airline that has crashed since 2002 (the casuality was 1 death) against 4 by regional airlines with a casuality of nearly 100 deaths. It was around the same time when I used to fly to Lexington, KY when ComAir Regional Jet crashed because of a Pilot and ATC error that caused it to take off from a shorter runway in the early hours of the fatal morning. All except the co-pilot died. Ever since then I watch out of the little window to see if it is taking off from the right runway. To my happiness, Lexington has closed the shorter runway.

I have been flying since 1979 and used to enjoy flying in Jumbo Jets (Boeing 747). Ever since my stay in US, I never had the privilege to travel in a 747, supposed to be the safest in the industry, as per one of my aeronautical friend who used to maintain the 747s. It seems that 747s can glide in the air for 15 mins with all engine failures and I think that should be good enough for us to reach some destination safely - land or water, and not heaven or hell.

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