Two major airline crashes in the last month is tragic. Fast Company has an interesting article on “why, in the 21st Century, do aircraft keep plummeting out of the sky?” I gave some of my answer last month in my posts on why airplane crashes happen and the role of communication styles in airplane crashes, following Gladwell’s excellent discussion in Outliers.
I focused on the accumulation of minor difficulties and seemingly trivial malfunctions that in themselves are inconsequential, but taken all together result in catastrophe. The Fast Company article looks in more detail at the difficulty of flying, the complexity of aircraft, and the adversary of the weather.
In spite of the recent crashes, air travel is still incredibly safe. (Although I prepare to die every time I fly — irrational, I know, but probably good for the soul! And ironically, this becomes more true the more I fly, which is about once or twice a month.)
At the end of the article they have a video of every global flight in a single day. Here it is as well:
Also in the article is a video of an aircraft trying to land in some vicious crosswinds, which I’ve also embedded here:
If you think about crashing when you fly, it’s worth noting that the most dangerous times are take-off and landing. As the article points out: “It’s at these times, when the aircraft is close to the ground and experiencing some of its greatest structural loads, generally flying slowly and contending with weather effects like crosswinds, that the most accidents occur.”
One last thing: It is interesting to me that, in regard to the two crashes in the last month, both planes were Airbuses. It has been pointed out that they were very differently configured Airbuses, but that doesn’t matter much to me. Other than the TVs right in the back of the seats, I can’t stand Airbuses. I recently had to fly on some during two legs of my trip to China, and the plane often felt like it was going to fall apart. That’s a bit of an exaggeration, but it was a marked contrast to the 747 we had on another leg of the trip.