This year has been a tragic one for international aviation, and the worst possible one for Malaysia. With just days to go for the New Year, and hopefully better days, comes the terrible news of another aircraft of an Asian country going missing, its fate yet to be known. If AirAsia Flight QZ8501, that lost contact with Indonesian air traffic control early Sunday, is lost as is feared, it would mark the 10th major air catastrophe. The year may have done more to put the fear of God into fliers than any other in recent memory, with at least 890 people confirmed dead, not counting the 162 on board the AirAsia flight.
In 2013, over three billion people flew, and there were an estimated 210 fatalities (IATA data). If a flight crashes in bad weather, that fact will not be of much consolation to the families of those killed. But when flights go down for entirely avoidable reasons, as two Malaysia Airlines flights did in 2014, they add an unbearable agony even though they may reflect on the course humanity may be taking in these contentious times.
The world may never know why Flight MH370 vanished from radar screens on March 8. An even worse fate overtook Flight MH17, that was shot down over eastern Ukraine on July 17 by a missile. These two incidents, with 239 and 298 on board respectively, brought out a most unusual human behaviour pattern, the first possibly of deliberate pilot interference; the second of warfare over territory bringing down a commercial jet for whatever perverted reason a country or a set of rebels could trot out for an act of sheer murder.
Modern avionics aids like sophisticated fly-by-wire technology, which all but make pilots redundant, should, in theory, make aviation nearly 100 per cent safe. It used to be said you had to cross the Atlantic an impossible 375,000 times a year for your number to come up statistically in an airliner crash fatality. Those odds have probably increased now due to many more flights and more people flying, with a recorded five per cent rise every year from 1980. An important lesson from all this, particularly in Asia, is that the strictest possible aviation regulations should be enforced without exception. Considering the frequency of reported near misses and other instances of reckless behaviour by flight crews in 2014, it’s time airlines and regulators cracked down on deviant pilot behaviour that may compromise safety. It’s the sad lot of passengers nowadays that their knuckles may turn white by the time they land safely.
