Chris Jasper
By Chris Jasper
Three crashes which have yet to be fully explained, involving the most modern airliners in the safest phase of flight, made last year the deadliest for air travel in almost a decade.
The loss of two Malaysian Air Boeing 777s, one thought to have disappeared in the Indian Ocean, and flight MH17 presumed shot down over Ukraine, plus last week’s unexplained AirAsia tragedy, killed 665 passengers, accounting for 75 percent of the annual toll of 884, according to safety consultant Ascend Worldwide.
The run of mystery crashes, which began when Malaysian Airline System flight MH370 vanished on March 8 and ended with the demise of AirAsia 8501 on a routine trip from Java to Singapore on December 28, meant 2014 was the most lethal year in civil aviation since 2005, when 1,056 died, Ascend said. The number of fatal crashes was unchanged, and the balance involved older turboprops flying in emerging nations and conforming more closely to the typical profile for accidents in recent years.
“Planes are becoming so big that the loss of even one wide-body can have a major impact on the data,” said Paul Hayes, head of safety at Ascend, who has tracked air-crash trends since 1974.
Planes seating more than 14 people suffered 10 events that killed passengers last year, the same number as in 2013, when 220 travellers died, and 2012, when 416 perished, Ascend said.
The three major crashes were unusual because each involved a modern, western-built model, with the Boeing 777 wide-bodies that operated Malaysian Air flights 370 and 17 dating from 2002 and 1997, respectively, and AirAsia’s lost Airbus Group A320 narrow-body built only in 2008.
All three jets had also been flying at cruising altitude, with 370 having levelled out at 35,000 feet after departing Kuala Lumpur for Beijing before doubling back over the Malay peninsula for unexplained reasons. 17 was operating at 33,000 feet when it plummeted to the ground, and 8501 was at 32,000 feet when its pilots asked to go higher in stormy weather.
The Netherlands-based Aviation Safety Network, which recorded 21 fatal airliner accidents last year, including cargo flights, said 13 crashes occurred in the en-route phase, versus three during both the initial climb and landing approach. One deadly event happened during landing itself and none on takeoff.
By contrast, between 1959 and 2013, 47 percent of crashes and 40 percent of deaths came during landing, Malaysia-based Maybank said, citing Boeing’s Statistical Summary of Jet Aeroplane Accidents. The cruise phase accounted for only 10 percent of crashes, though survivability was lower, so that it produced 20 percent of fatalities.
While full explanations have yet to be formulated for the three worst incidents of 2014, safety experts have suggested the disappearance of 370 — and its 227 passengers — most likely involved pilot malpractice, since all devices indicating the plane’s position were turned off. A search for debris and the 777’s black-box flight recorders that might reveal the truth of its demise continues off Australia.
Malaysian Air flight 17 was downed in a war zone in eastern Ukraine, killing all 283 passengers, after being hit by “a large number of high-energy objects,” the Dutch Safety Board said. Among other events in 2014, the worst involved the loss of a McDonnell Douglas MD-83 jet flying for Air Algerie in Mali on July 24, killing 110 travellers, and a TransAsia Airways Corp. ATR-72 crash in Taiwan a day earlier, with 44 passenger deaths. Some 15 travellers also died when a Nepal Airlines de Havilland Canada DHC-6 Twin Otter turboprop hit jungle on a 7,000-foot hillside in poor weather on February 16.
A crash that killed 42 people in Iran in August came after the country sought to develop its own aerospace industry to escape the impact of western sanctions. The government later grounded the Iran-140 turboprop to determine whether a spate of accidents could be traced to faults intrinsic to the plane.
About 100,000 flights a day land without incident worldwide, the International Air Transport Association says. In 2013, passenger trips on airlines exceeded 3 billion.
WP-BLOOMBERG
By Chris Jasper
Three crashes which have yet to be fully explained, involving the most modern airliners in the safest phase of flight, made last year the deadliest for air travel in almost a decade.
The loss of two Malaysian Air Boeing 777s, one thought to have disappeared in the Indian Ocean, and flight MH17 presumed shot down over Ukraine, plus last week’s unexplained AirAsia tragedy, killed 665 passengers, accounting for 75 percent of the annual toll of 884, according to safety consultant Ascend Worldwide.
The run of mystery crashes, which began when Malaysian Airline System flight MH370 vanished on March 8 and ended with the demise of AirAsia 8501 on a routine trip from Java to Singapore on December 28, meant 2014 was the most lethal year in civil aviation since 2005, when 1,056 died, Ascend said. The number of fatal crashes was unchanged, and the balance involved older turboprops flying in emerging nations and conforming more closely to the typical profile for accidents in recent years.
“Planes are becoming so big that the loss of even one wide-body can have a major impact on the data,” said Paul Hayes, head of safety at Ascend, who has tracked air-crash trends since 1974.
Planes seating more than 14 people suffered 10 events that killed passengers last year, the same number as in 2013, when 220 travellers died, and 2012, when 416 perished, Ascend said.
The three major crashes were unusual because each involved a modern, western-built model, with the Boeing 777 wide-bodies that operated Malaysian Air flights 370 and 17 dating from 2002 and 1997, respectively, and AirAsia’s lost Airbus Group A320 narrow-body built only in 2008.
All three jets had also been flying at cruising altitude, with 370 having levelled out at 35,000 feet after departing Kuala Lumpur for Beijing before doubling back over the Malay peninsula for unexplained reasons. 17 was operating at 33,000 feet when it plummeted to the ground, and 8501 was at 32,000 feet when its pilots asked to go higher in stormy weather.
The Netherlands-based Aviation Safety Network, which recorded 21 fatal airliner accidents last year, including cargo flights, said 13 crashes occurred in the en-route phase, versus three during both the initial climb and landing approach. One deadly event happened during landing itself and none on takeoff.
By contrast, between 1959 and 2013, 47 percent of crashes and 40 percent of deaths came during landing, Malaysia-based Maybank said, citing Boeing’s Statistical Summary of Jet Aeroplane Accidents. The cruise phase accounted for only 10 percent of crashes, though survivability was lower, so that it produced 20 percent of fatalities.
While full explanations have yet to be formulated for the three worst incidents of 2014, safety experts have suggested the disappearance of 370 — and its 227 passengers — most likely involved pilot malpractice, since all devices indicating the plane’s position were turned off. A search for debris and the 777’s black-box flight recorders that might reveal the truth of its demise continues off Australia.
Malaysian Air flight 17 was downed in a war zone in eastern Ukraine, killing all 283 passengers, after being hit by “a large number of high-energy objects,” the Dutch Safety Board said. Among other events in 2014, the worst involved the loss of a McDonnell Douglas MD-83 jet flying for Air Algerie in Mali on July 24, killing 110 travellers, and a TransAsia Airways Corp. ATR-72 crash in Taiwan a day earlier, with 44 passenger deaths. Some 15 travellers also died when a Nepal Airlines de Havilland Canada DHC-6 Twin Otter turboprop hit jungle on a 7,000-foot hillside in poor weather on February 16.
A crash that killed 42 people in Iran in August came after the country sought to develop its own aerospace industry to escape the impact of western sanctions. The government later grounded the Iran-140 turboprop to determine whether a spate of accidents could be traced to faults intrinsic to the plane.
About 100,000 flights a day land without incident worldwide, the International Air Transport Association says. In 2013, passenger trips on airlines exceeded 3 billion.
WP-BLOOMBERG
