THE TRAGIC deaths at Cork airport of six people on a flight from Belfast will strike a chord among those who fly regularly. And that means everyone in this era of mass air travel in which the aircraft has become an essential tool of ordinary life. Habits will not change but yesterday’s events will give cause for pause.
Although too early to speculate about the precise cause of the crash of the 19-seat turbo prop aircraft, a reliable and popular commuter plane, thick fog at the airport clearly played its part, reminding us of the vulnerability of air travel, despite technological advance, to the vicissitudes of the weather. Visibility on the ground was down to 300 metres with broken cloud cover as low as 100 feet above ground. The circumstances eerily recall last April’s crash in Smolensk of a Polish Air Force Tu-154 killing all 96 people on board, including the country’s president Lech Kaczynski.
For many of us, somewhat mystified by the physics of flight and by what keeps an aircraft aloft, every journey by plane remains largely an act of faith in the pilot and the airline. That is reinforced, though shaken again now, by the often-repeated and reassuring mantra that air travel is one of the safest methods of transport known to man. Indeed, the only previous reference to Cork Airport in the fatal accident database of the international Aviation Safety Network is to the mysterious tragedy at Tuskar Rock in 1968 when 61 died on an Aer Lingus Viscount travelling from Cork to London. This is testimony to Cork’s – and Ireland’s – first-rate air safety record.
But air travel today is genuinely safer than ever. The European Aviation Safety Agency, in its latest report, points to a remarkable decline in air deaths in the years since 1948. Globally, passenger fatalities per 100 million miles flown declined in the first two decades since then by a factor of ten (5 to 0.5) and improved further in the interim by an extraordinary 50-fold. That is paralleled, although somewhat less dramatically, by a decline in the number of flights involved in fatal accidents. In 1993 for every 10 million flights, there were some 21 crashes. In the latter half of the last decade that figure had fallen to an average of between four and five per year.
But such statistics will provide cold comfort to the families of those who lost their lives yesterday. In the short term, they are left with the ultimate loss and many questions over the factors that gave rise to it. Our hearts go out to them along with our gratitude to the emergency services – and others – who responded so professionally in the most difficult of circumstances.