2014 has not been a good year for the aviation industry. First there was the loss of Malaysian flight MH370 which mysteriously deviated off course and is presumed down somewhere in the vast Indian ocean. Millions have been spent searching for the wreckage - and this search is ongoing.
Malaysia had the misfortune to again lose an aircraft when flight MH17 was brought down by a missile over Ukraine.The passengers and crew became a victim of a war raging between separatists encouraged by Russia and the Ukrainian army - and both sides deny firing that fatal shot.
Right at years end an AsiaAir AirBus flying from Surabaya in Indonesia to Singapore goes missing over the Java sea. We know that plane encountered thunderstorms and the pilot asked to climb to thirty-eight thousand feet, but then silence until wreckage was seen in the water days later.
Todays modern aircraft are packed with features that ensure safety. It is possible for them to take off, fly the journey and land at the airport of destination without help from the pilots. In fact, once airborne the task of flying the plane is handed to the auto pilot and the human pilot simply guides the plane through the computer devised procedure at takeoff and landings.
Some aviation experts think that may be one of the problems. Perhaps the lack of actual "hands on " experience flying the plane has caused flight crews to become more "computer programmers "than pilots and in an emergency trying to correct a problem with the computer may be more dangerous than actually taking manual control. In such cases, pilots with thousands of hours of flight time would be even more removed and reluctant to go back to the basics. Perhaps passengers are safest flying with newly minted pilots who have just completed the rigorous training to qualify for their license.
Some aviation experts speculate that when that AsiaAir plane climbed to avoid a thunderstorm it would need to increase speed to compensate for the thinner air at that altitude decreasing "lift ". If it were flying too slowly, there is the possibility of going into a stall - and falling into the sea.
Perhaps the airline industry needs to revise it's training programmes to ensure senior pilots spend more time in those amazing flight simulators where they are required to correct all sorts of emergency situations with hands on control. Massive hours sitting in the pilot's seat do not sharpen wits as well as actually having to counter emergencies deliberately contrived in training sessions to test and enhance piloting skills.
These disasters also throw the spotlight on the "black box " flight data recorders. This is now old technology. The recorder is supposed to help locate the downed aircraft and it contains a "pinger " with a life of just thirty days. Cockpit conversations are recorded and all the technical information about the planes mechanical functions can usually be recovered.
There is no technical reason why the information stored in that "black box "can not be transmitted back to base the second it is being recorded, making the actual recovery of the black box less important - and amazing progress has been made with lithium-ion batteries and the processing of information in Smartphones. Surely the location time can be extended and the range increased to make use of global satellites to "triangulate "position, as is the procedure within the mobile phone industry.
Low cost airlines will certainly not welcome the added cost of an upgraded positioning device, but the technology already exists to improve on the existing system and it is probably a tribute to the safety of air travel that something that has remained unchanged for decades has been allowed to continue unchanged. It is only the nature and extent of these recent events that are highlighting their shortcomings.
The fact remains that we are far safer sitting in an airline seat that most other forms of travel. The airline industry spends incredible amounts of money investigating each and every disaster to find the cause - and implement a solution. What has happened in 2014 can only make future flying safer !
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