Emergency specialists work at the crash site of an Azerbaijan Airlines passenger jet near the western Kazakh city of Aktau on December 25, 2024. (Photo by Issa Tazhenbayev / AFP)
How safe is modern flying as the skies get more and more crowded and aviation infrastructure gets stretched like never before with far more people flying four years after the Covid pandemic and gigantic orders are being placed for aircraft?
The year going by seemed to be coping reasonably well with the demand until Russian defence forces shot down an Azerbaijan plane flying close to the Ukraine war zone and a low-cost Korean airline’s Boeing slammed into a wall after belly landing in an emergency to cause one of the worst crashes in South Korean aviation history.
Boeing, the major manufacturer of planes, had a whale of a time in 2024 trying to find out what is wrong as doors kept coming off midair, and aircraft were malfunctioning too often for comfort, besides the crash in South Korea whose carrier has ordered a comprehensive inspection of its entire Boeing 737-800 fleet as landing gear problem struck another plane.
What is causing the most consternation is the mystery surrounding the Jeju Air airplane which belly-landed and skidded off the runway to run into a hard permanent structure in an airfield and burst into flames. Why did its landing gear not function properly even if it had collided with a fleet of birds and why were emergency vehicles not in place at the scene of a forced landing?
Flyers are known to get on to flights with a prayer on their lips after suffering major discomforts due to inadequate infra to handle all the flights even as airlines, particularly in India, take their chances by overworking pilots beyond their stipulated flying hours just to cope with the schedule of operations.
And then there was the shocking news from the Caspian Sea as an Azerbaijan airliner’s Embraer 190 was brought down because it may have been mistaken for a drone or such offensive projectile. The Azerbaijan people felt more hurt as there was not even an offer of compensation from Putin’s Russia.
In a year of major climate change catastrophes, as many as 2,000 people may have died and $288 billion of damage wrought. The aviation disaster numbers may pale in comparison, but then man can do something about safe aviation but too many are cutting corners in making planes and flying them to meet rising demand even as aviation costs the environment dearly. There was much food for thought then about flying in 2024.
( Source : Deccan Chronicle )
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