Oh my god What's happening up in the sky?
The incident appears to have started in January, when a Boeing 737 MAX 9 operated by Alaska Airlines had its door plug blown in mid-air. Subsequent investigations led to a series of revelations about a shaky safety culture at Boeing and its contractors. Then came the ominous headlines. Just this month, a wheel fell off a United Airlines jetliner after taking off from San Francisco. Flames erupted from the engine of a United Airlines flight departing from Houston, Texas. In Houston, another United Airlines flight veered off the runway during landing. A Boeing 787 Dreamliner operated by Chilean airline Latam and bound for Auckland, New Zealand, suddenly lost altitude mid-air, injuring dozens of passengers.
The incident causes anxiety. “The public has the right to be cautious,” said Daniel Kwasi Agyekum, a former Ghana Air Force squadron commander who later flew a Boeing 737 and is now a professor of aviation safety at the University of North Dakota. talk.
But data collected rigorously by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration and other global regulators shows that commercial aviation is actually very safe, and has gotten even safer in just the last 20 years. “The statistics don't show any significant abnormalities,” Agyekum said. “Millions of flights are operated by airlines around the world every day, transporting passengers safely from point A to point B.”
This incident comes as the media is primed to report on the horrifying but non-fatal failures that occur when humans operate systems of all kinds, especially those involving Boeing aircraft. It may feel like it's happening quickly. However, aviation systems always have redundancies built in, so the loss of one wheel, for example, will not lead to a catastrophic accident.
But such public attention could actually be beneficial to the airline industry, Agyekum says. “The media spotlight puts all of us in the aviation industry on special notice,” he says. “We will go back to the lottery table and use the data we collect to improve safety.”
There has not been a fatal commercial aircraft accident in the United States since 2018, when a passenger onboard a Southwest Airlines flight suffered a partial engine failure and a broken cabin window, killing one passenger. Prior to that, no one had died on a U.S. aircraft since 2009.
“In 2023, American aviation was the safest form of transportation,” said Hassan Sahid, president and CEO of the Flight Safety Foundation, a nonprofit research and advocacy group.
Experts attribute much of the U.S. civil aviation industry's impressive track record of success to its approach to transparency. In the 1990s, the FAA established the idea that anyone in the aviation industry – manufacturers, production line workers, air traffic controllers, pilots, crew members, maintenance personnel – should be able to report their mistakes without having to face their careers. began reorienting the safety program based on -Ending effects.
