Airline safety

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Nereus
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Airline safety

Post by Nereus »

Aviation world was lucky in 2017, analyst warns

http://www.flightsafetyaustralia.com/20 ... yst-warns/

Last year was the safest in the history of commercial aviation, according to analyses by independent consultants.

For 2017, the Aviation Safety Network (ASN) recorded 10 fatal accidents involving large (more than 14 seats) air transport aircraft, resulting in 44 occupant deaths and 35 persons on the ground. Five of the crashes involved cargo flights and five were passenger flights. All the ground deaths happened in the crash of a Turkish Boeing 747 freighter in Kyrgyzstan.

The ASN calculates that with worldwide air traffic of about 36,800,000 flights, the 2017 accident rate was one fatal passenger flight accident per 7,360,000 flights. ‘This makes 2017 the safest year ever, both by the number of fatal accidents as well as in terms of fatalities,’ the ASN said.

There were no fatal crashes in jet engine passenger aircraft last year, anywhere in the world. The last such crash was in Colombia, in November 2016, when an Avro RJ85 crashed after fuel exhaustion. It has been more than two years since any aircraft crash has claimed more than 100 lives. That was the destruction of an Airbus A321 operated by Russian low-cost carrier Metrojet, over the Sinai, Egypt, in October 2015.

By comparison, the ASN recorded 16 accidents and 303 lives lost in 2016.

However, in a new year blog post, Adrian Young of Netherlands-based consultancy To70 cautioned against complacency. ‘Despite the good news, a note of caution needs to be sounded,’ Young said. ‘With only two fatal accidents to passenger airliners, both involving small turboprop planes, 2017 was much better than could reasonably (and statistically) be expected, and was again better than last year’s remarkable performance,’ he said.

Young concludes, ‘the extraordinarily low accident rate this year must be seen as a case of good fortune. Statistically speaking, in a dataset that starts with over thirty million flights, there is little difference between two accidents and ten accidents. That this year’s accidents only resulted in 13 fatalities is even greater fortune.

That run of good luck was absent from general aviation in Australia, which was marred by several high-profile crashes in 2017. They included the crashes of a Grumman Mallard in Perth in January, a Beech Super King Air at Essendon, in February, a Cessna Conquest in South Australia in May, a Squirrel helicopter at Hobart in October and a DHC-2 Beaver north of Sydney on New Year’s Eve.
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Re: Airline safety

Post by Nereus »

First the good news; now the not-so-good

http://www.flightsafetyaustralia.com/20 ... t-so-good/

Last year, 2017, was the safest year for commercial aviation, with no fatal crashes in jet engine passenger aircraft anywhere in the world, so why has 2018 started off so badly? In the first three months of this year, almost 200 have died in passenger plane crashes, with the most recent being in Nepal where 49 people died. Is there a problem with airline safety, or is this an unfortunate anomaly?

The answer, luckily, to the first question, is ‘no’. Air travel continues to be the safest form of transport in the world. It is too early to draw any comparisons between the accidents, but it’s worth looking to see if they share any common themes.

The year began badly on 13 January, when Pegasus Airlines Flight 8622 skidded off the end of the runway at Trabzon Airport, Turkey and came to rest halfway down a cliff just metres from the sea. Luckily, all 162 passengers and crew evacuated safely, or the number of fatalities for this year could have been significantly worse.

The month of February saw four international accidents of commercial high-capacity air transport aircraft. Two of these were deadly, killing 137 people in total. Saratov Airlines Flight 703 crashed shortly after take-off from Domodedovo International Airport in Russia killing all 71 people on board; and then a week later, Iran Aseman Airlines Flight 3704 crashed into the Zagros Mountains in Iran killing all 66 on board. The Saratov Airlines accident appears to have been caused by icing covering the speed sensors when the heating of the three pitot tubes was not turned on despite it being the middle of winter.

Monday’s (12 March) crash of US-Bangla Airlines Flight 211 at Tribhuvan International Airport, Kathmandu seems to have been caused by confusion between air traffic control and the pilot as to which end of the designated runway should be used for landing.

Can this string of accidents be linked? Captain Darren Straker, former Chief Air Accident Investigator at UAE’s General Civil Aviation Authority (GCAA) and independent investigator at Straker System Safety, claimed there was a common theme in some of the commercial airline crashes—an ‘attributable cause based on human error’.

‘A bad start to the year? Yes, but I think last year was the aberration, the system is now back to accidents and operational liabilities,’ he said. ‘Despite the ICAO accident data trend decreasing for several years, the alarming increase in accidents where no technical cause has been prioritised, indicates that that the systemic underlying causes are still prevalent in accident causation.’

However, Saj Ahmad, chief analyst at StrategicAero Research, said it was ‘totally wrong to wonder why one year has had successive incidents and previous years may not have had any. Equally, it’s unfair and irresponsible to try and connect [the crashes] in any way and air transport remains by far and away the single safest method of travel in the world.’

‘Human error is always possible, and it has happened in various crashes—but the events of 2018 are still under investigation and nothing is clear about any of the crashes yet, let alone pilot error being a factor,’ Mr Ahmad said.
And, as Flight Safety Australia has discussed in the past, most recently in May 2017, even if it is a common theme in these accidents, how useful is designating ‘pilot error’ as a causal factor?
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Re: Airline safety

Post by handdrummer »

If pilot error is the problem perhaps more and better training is needed, especially on the non-major airlines. Would you hire the kid driving a motorbike to drive your Ferrari?
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