Flying the safe skies

2017 was the first year on record without any major air mishap. Flying is safer than ever before

It is close to 400 days since the last large commercial passenger aircraft crashed. It isn't as if there were no air crashes this past year, there have been numerous mishaps involving small aircraft and a cargo Boeing 747 went down in Kyrgyzstan killing 39 people mostly on the ground. Crucially, no large aircraft carrying more than 20 passengers has crashed over the past year whether it was a scheduled flight or a charter flight. The last major commercial air disaster was the crash of the aircraft that tragically killed most of the players of Brazilian football club Chapecoense back in November 2016.

This is truly a remarkable statistic given the exponential growth of commercial aviation across the world including in India; domestic air traffic in 2017 was close to 120 million passengers, a 50 per cent increase from 2015. Even mature markets like Western Europe and America are growing and in China aerial congestion is so bad that the government is scrambling to solve the problem on a priority basis. All these are dramatic changes from barely a couple of decades ago, when a major commercial disaster every few months was a given. Yet developments in air traffic control as well as flight technologies all with a whole new generation of aircraft have meant that navigating the skies is safer despite such dramatic traffic growth. According to global flight tracking service Flightradar24, the maximum number of commercial flights they tracked in a single day globally exceeded an incredible 190,000 flights.

While air travel has become incredibly safe, travel on the ground remains as deadly as ever. It is estimated that 1.5 million people would have died in road accidents across the world in 2017. It is remarkable that humans can manage the complicated task of three-dimensional manoeuvring in the air but fail at the rather less complicated task of making their way safely on the ground. Partially, this is because of the lack of safety culture, something that is ingrained in the aviation community, where each and every accident has led to an improved understanding of the inherent dangers of putting a hollow, aluminium tube five miles up in the air. On roads, we drive and we walk with little or no concern for ourselves or fellow road-users. Maybe, we should all draw lessons from the safety-obsession of the civilian air industry and get a bit more safety obsessed ourselves on terra firma.