Safety: August 2008 Archives

After a few quiet months air safety is suddenly smack-bang back on the news agenda. The Spanair crash in Madrid and the 737 loss in Kyrgyzstan over the weekend have seen that. And so it's hard luck on Ryanair to have a depressurisation a couple of days later, and make-your-own-luck for Air Canada Jazz for going public with plans to take lifejackets out of some aircraft. Expect more of this for a while anyway.

Every once in a while things happen in aircraft that you simply couldn't make up. This email, currently doing the rounds, appears to be authentic and the pix below back it up.

Pilots may feel that there is a certain step in the sequence of events which may have been, how can I put this, more optimally executed.

Kudos to Lockheed for building them to last.

Full story below....

I've banged on about this before, but a new accident report from Taiwan rams the point home for anyone who wasn't paying attention. If you only do one thing to keep yourself safe as an airliner passenger, just make sure it's fastening your seatbelt.

This particular accident wasn't caused by turbulence, it was due to a collision-warning alert and the ensuing events. The report makes interesting reading - but the photos and injury descriptions are the bits passengers need to pay attention to.

The fact is that in a jet airliner your soft body is being projected through space at several hundreds of miles per hour surrounded by necessarily hard stuff. Anything that happens to distub the equilibrium of your trajectory is likely to end badly for you. And such things do happen quite a bit.

Read my earlier post here.