Is it “still safe to fly”? That’s the alarming question asked by one newspaper as it reported that 2024 has already been “one of the worst for air travel that anyone can remember”.
But just how dangerous is air travel and what has caused this year to be so bad?
‘Horror comics’
This year “has been one of the worst for air accidents that anyone can remember”, said The Sunday Times. It got off to a tragic start in January when Japan Airlines flight 516 collided with a De Havilland coastguard plane as it landed in Toyko, killing five people.
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Within days, a panel blew out on Alaska Airlines flight 1282, “leaving a gaping hole in the cabin” and “terrified passengers breathing through oxygen masks”. These two incidents saw “aviation safety thrown into the spotlight”, said Euractiv. Months later, the front windscreen of an Austrian Airlines Airbus A320 flying from Mallorca to Vienna was shattered and most of the nose cone was torn off.
Turbulence has been a major issue in 2024, with serious injuries being caused and the first death on a large commercial airliner since 1997. In May, a Boeing 777 hit “some of the worst turbulence that Singapore Airlines pilots have experienced”, said The Sunday Times. A passenger died of a heart attack and more than 40 suffered skull, brain, spinal or bone injuries.
Then, earlier this month, all 62 passengers and crew died when the Voepass ATR 72-500 turboprop they were travelling in crashed in Brazil after the plane “corkscrewed down 17,000ft in just one minute”.
Meanwhile, airline bosses told the newspaper there has been an increase in “horror comics” – the internal air safety reports that pilots have to file if they encounter serious turbulence or other safety issues on a flight.
All of this is making passengers more anxious. In June, the analytics company Quantum Metric found that one in five travellers aged 18-54 now checks the aircraft type when buying an air ticket and one in four plans to take fewer flights this year due to safety concerns.
‘Catastrophic combination’
So what’s gone wrong? Aviation is “being assailed on two fronts” – a “nosedive” at Boeing and “increasing turbulence”, said The Sunday Times.
“Poorly made aircraft” are an issue, and a series of Boeing 737 Max 8 crashes were caused by a “catastrophic combination of corner-cutting, poor risk assessment and a calculated failure to inform airlines, pilots and regulators about changes to flight control software on the new jet that went into service in 2017”.
Tim Clark, president of Emirates, the world’s largest international carrier, said it is a “fact of life” that there has been “an uptick in clear air turbulence in the last year or two”. Clear air turbulence is the most dangerous kind because pilots cannot see or predict it. Writing for The Irish Times, Paula Gahan said that after a decade as a cabin crew member, she had “little doubt” that turbulence is “getting worse” – and scientists support this.
Paul Williams, professor of atmospheric science at Reading University, told The Sunday Times that climate change is to blame, because rising air temperatures are disrupting the speed and flow of jet streams. But Nick Careen, head of operations, safety and security at IATA, the aviation industry’s trade body, said: “We certainly can’t put a finger on saying this is all environmentally driven” and “there needs to be more study”.
A Harvard University study from 2017 found that the odds that a plane you are flying on will crash are one in 1.2 million and the odds of dying in a crash are one in 11 million. To put these figures in context, your chances of dying in a car accident are one in 5,000.
