HAMBURG (dpa) – At first glance it seems like a contradiction. A total of 1,126 people were killed last year in 37 airliner crashes – 396 more than in 1999 – yet travelling by civilian airliner is becoming safer and that is borne out by the facts.
Civilian air traffic is growing by around five per cent a year but each year sees a safety increase too. Particularly comforting for German travellers may be the knowledge that no German airline was involved in an accident in 2000.
Last year the number of airline crash victims was also below the average death toll for the previous ten years (1,246) although the figures do not include people killed in private and military planes.The number of fatal air crashes in 1999 was 48 – considerably more than the 37 in 2000, according to documents of the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) and respected English aviation journal Flight International.
Last year was characterized by major air disasters.
There were a total of nine serious accidents worldwide, each resulting in more than 30 deaths. On January 30 last year, 169 people were killed when an Airbus A310 operated by Kenya Airways crashed at Abidjan, the Ivory Coast port.
A crash landing by a Boeing 737-200 of Air Philippines on Samal Island killed 131 people on April 19 and 109 people were burned to death in the Concorde disaster on July 25 near Paris. Rescuers counted 143 dead when a Gulf Air Airbus A320 plunged into the sea near Bahrain on August 23.
Despite these incidents experts insist that air travel is becoming safer year by year. The number of civilian aviation deaths has remained virtually unchanged since the 1950s although air traffic has increased more than 20 times.
The really bad years stick in people’s memory though – 1972 and 1996 with 2,572 and 1,840 deaths respectively – considerably more than the mean for recent decades.
Critical voices predict that the number of air crashes may increase disproportionally, especially in Europe – where more than 40 air traffic control centres, 31 of them national, work with 30 different programming languages.
Against a background of a steady increase in the number of air movements, this diversity prevents the very coordination and standardization essential to air traffic control safety.
The national desire to go it alone could in the long-term seriously endanger the opportunity to improve the safety in European skies.
Apart from these fears, the balance for 2000 shows that the majority of accidents and disasters are caused by human error. The worst examples: October 31 at Chang Kai Shek airport in Taipeh when 83 of 179 people died on board a Boeing 747-400 of Singapore Airlines, an airline with an excellent safety record.
The plane collided with construction equipment after pilots used the wrong runway for takeoff.
No less dangerous was the behaviour of a Hapag-Lloyd charter pilot on July 12. Crassly ignoring aviation experience and regulations the crew flew the Airbus A310-300 from Crete to Vienna in one go although the undercarriage was jammed in the retracted position. The excessive fuel consumption alone would have justified an unscheduled landing.
As a result, the Airbus covered the last 20 kilometres with no engine power at all and “landed” a few hundred metres short of the runway. The plane was wrecked but miraculously no one was killed. Seldom in aviation history have crew and passengers had such good luck.
Flying is still the safest way of travelling after train travel. According to the European Transport Safety Council, there are 0.04 deaths per 100 million passenger kilometres – the number of passengers multiplied by the distance covered.
The figure for air travel is twice as high at 0.08 and in the case of private cars 0.8. In other words, flying is ten times as safe as driving a car. Comparisons make grim reading – for motorcyclists the appropriate index figure is 16.0.
