Catching the Jitter Fly

On a recent fine August day, I had a little bit of a scare. My Air China flight from Ningbo to Beijing was just rolling down the runway for take-off. I was sitting quietly, unopened book in lap and smug thoughts about a certain half-price plane ticket in mind, when my seat started shaking, harder than before.

The engine sputtered once, twice; the pilot then tried to rev up again, resulting in engine sputters three, four. When a third attempt left us as grounded as before, a stewardess announced that she was very sorry, that the plane would have to be taken in for repairs. The mutterings that went around the cabin pretty much reflected my own sentiments, which, to be perfectly dramatic, were something along these lines: We could have all died!

Obviously, I’m still very much alive—but that is beside the point. What I’d particularly like to note is a current and worrisome trend: the recent reports crash after crash after crash.

There was that little Cypriot accident on August 14 that left 121 dead near Athens. Two days later a double engine failure above Venezuela resulted in 160 deaths; nine days later an emergency landing in Peru killed 40, making August the deadliest month for airplane crashes since May 2002. Some of the superstitious breathed a sigh of relief at that point, saying plane crashes come in threes—but they didn’t have much time before crash number four started the cycle again. September 5 brought the Indonesia crash that killed at least 149, leaving even the most hardened and sober among us wondering: where next?

Of course, airlines are rushing to reassure us that planes are still safe, and make no mistake, they are. The numbers show that, currently, my chances of dying on the next flight are about eight million to one, much lower than when I’m driving to the grocery store. Then again, the mortality rate of a plane crash, if one should be so unlucky, is pretty darn high—commercial airliners don’t get away with many fender-benders—and the state of the airline industry is reaching new lows. These facts taken together are rather disconcerting. With increasing competition from smaller airlines, many large companies are scaling back to save money. The question is, where are they scaling back? Now, we don’t mind missing out on a stale bread roll or two, but if airplane maintenance and thus safety are in any way shortchanged, well, we’re dead.

So airlines need to take a step back and size up the situation. While it’s impossible to eradicate all risk, every possible step must be taken to minimize it, even at higher costs. Excepting the Peru crash that was the result of inclement weather, the other three major accidents are thought to have technical causes. The Greek jet, it is said, suffered a sudden loss in cabin pressure that could have resulted from failures in the air conditioning system. The Venezuelan twin-engine failure could have been either because of fuel contamination or maintenance malfunction (and is the second fatal flight this year by low-cost provider West Caribbean Airlines). While inspections have not yielded clear results for the Indonesian flight, the aging Boeing was nearly 25 years old—and scheduled to keep flying for eleven more years. I suspect that these accidents were not altogether unavoidable given more careful maintenance or a less thrifty schedule of plane replacement.

Here’s where the airlines can take their next steps: increase safety precautions; up maintenance rigor, tighten inspection standards, and, most importantly, don’t go breaking any more crash statistic records. After all, it’s not enough just to assert that planes are safe—these crashes are affecting nerves more than anything else. Consumer confidence is a powerful thing, and it must be bolstered, or the airline industry itself could be in for a crash.

N. Kathy Lin ’08, a Crimson editorial editor, is a social studies concentrator in Winthrop House.