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Monday, Nov 23, 2009
With airplanes crashing everywhere, is it time to run away from the newest, cheapest carriers?
Sep 9, 2005 | It all began on Aug. 2, the day Air France flight 358 went wallowing into a ravine off the end of runway 24L in Toronto. This was followed in quick succession by the ditching of a Tunisian ATR-72 turboprop in the Mediterranean Sea; the inexplicable Helios Airways tragedy outside Athens; the apparent dual engine failure of an MD-80 over the Venezuelan jungle; the crash of a Peruvian jetliner near the Amazon city of Pucallpa; and now, on Monday, the fiery wreck of an Indonesian 737 on the island of Sumatra. And although we rarely address matters involving rotorcraft, it warrants mention that 14 people were killed on Aug. 10 when a commercial helicopter traveling from Tallinn, Estonia, to the Finnish capital of Helsinki plunged into the Baltic Sea. That's seven serious incidents and more than 330 fatalities in less than five weeks, representing one of civil aviation's worst-ever stretches.
As discussed in this space two weeks ago, this unusual accident spike, even with the newest additions from Peru and Indonesia, is just that, and unlikely to mean much over the long term.The International Civil Aviation Organization, a branch of the United Nations, reports that for every million flights, the chance of a crash is one-sixth what it was in 1980. That's notable in light of the rapid expansion of commercial flying in countries like India, China and Brazil. The number of worldwide takeoffs is presently increasing at a rate of about 10 per day, and while the raw number of casualties may indeed rise slightly in the years ahead, that total should signify little added danger when seen as a percentage of worldwide departures.
Still, for those predisposed to flight-related anxieties, nothing could seem a more obvious justification for staying on the ground than the past month's headlines. "My phone has been ringing off the hook," says Tom Bunn, retired Pan Am captain and the president of SOAR, one of the nation's leading fear-of-flying workshops. From his office in Connecticut, Bunn has been fielding an onslaught of calls and e-mails from petrified passengers. But are heightened levels of worry really justified? And what exactly are the lessons here?
Looking at the accidents collectively, two things jump out. First, if not foremost, we notice that in four of the seven cases, many if not most of the occupants survived. All 309 passengers and crew escaped the burning Air France A340, albeit some of them, including the plane's first officer, were badly injured. Off the coast of Sicily, 23 of 39 people were rescued from the submerged ATR, as were more than half of those aboard the shattered 737 in Peru. On Sumatra, 16 of 117 made it to safety.
This flies in the face of conventional passenger wisdom. Ask your seatmate, face buried in the newspaper during the pre-takeoff safety spiel, why he or she refuses to pay attention, and the answer is typically along the lines of, Well, if anything happens we're all going to die anyway. Actually, you're probably not going to die. Most accidents are not full-blown catastrophes, and according to the National Transportation Safety Board, more than three-quarters of passengers involved in non-catastrophic events do survive. Additionally, those who mock the life vest demo should remember that ATR splashdown. The truth and fallacy of water landings has been one of Ask the Pilot's most venerably controversial topics, and now we have a fresh example of people making good use of their flotation devices.
Otherwise, if these unfortunate events share a point worth bringing up, it's that none of them involved airlines from the United States, and only one -- Air France at Toronto -- involved anything close to what we'd consider a major carrier. We have Helios Airways, Tuninter, West Caribbean Airways, TANS and Mandala Airlines. (The helicopter operator was a Finnish company called Copterline.) What this means, or doesn't mean, depends on how worked up one chooses to get over small differences in comparative statistics.
My contention a few paragraphs ago, that an increase in the number of crashes is balanced by the growing number of flights, assumes a level worldwide playing field. Analyzing things more closely will show that flying in certain areas -- namely parts of Africa, Asia and South America -- is, and will continue to be, slightly more dangerous than flying in North America, Western Europe, and other regions with advanced aviation infrastructures.
Note the emphasis on "slightly." This column has, on numerous occasions, fought long and hard to debunk myths and misconceptions about smaller and/or foreign carriers, and readers are reminded that the distinction between a "safe" and a "dangerous" airline is at heart an academic one -- the difference of a single tragedy or two gauged over thousands, even millions, of departures. For background, you might wish to revisit Ask the Pilot's installment of Feb. 18, 2005, which includes a list of airlines that have gone fatality-free over the past 25 years.
But for the record: Helios Airways, West Caribbean, TANS? Who are those companies? Air France is easy enough; the world's eighth-largest airline in terms of passenger volume, founded in 1933. But even I, a devout student of the industry's most obscure names, had trouble placing the rest of them.
Turns out Helios, headquartered on Cyprus, was formed about seven years ago (with a mailing address on Nietzsche Street, which can't be good for karma) and until the Athens debacle was operating a threesome of 737s. West Caribbean, which also commenced flying in 1998, hails from Medellin, Colombia, with a roster of about 15 turboprops and MD-80 twin-jets. The ATR that plunked into the Mediterranean was one of three possessed by Tuninter, subsidiary of Tunisair, the Tunisian national airline. The Peruvian 737 was flown by TANS, oldest of the bunch with a start-up date of 1964; it's administered by the military. Jakarta-based Mandala Airlines was founded in 1969 and flies about a dozen, mostly early '80s-vintage 737s.
Where applicable, don't confuse these airlines with the larger and well-established flag carriers of their respective countries. Helios has nothing to do with Cyprus Airways (1947), while Tuninter is not the same as Tunisair (1948, with an impeccable safety record). Down in Colombia, West Caribbean has no relation to Avianca (1919, and the second-oldest airline in the world), and Indonesia's Mandala is not affiliated with the better-known Garuda (1949).
