Highs and lows of aviation safety

A recent spate of fatal air accidents around the world has once again sparked a debate about aviation safety. With India's aviation sector being the fastest growing in the world, this should interest all Indians. As an active pilot for three decades, it is certainly of great interest to me.

- BAIJAYANT 'JAY' PANDA

To be clear, civilian commercial air travel is very, very safe. Over the decades, its safety record has consistently improved to such a level that it is indeed far safer than driving. Global statistics show the risk of dying in a car crash is about two lakh times higher than in a plane crash.

Aviation's best known safety measurement is the US statistical tracking of accidents per one lakh hours of flight, which has dropped sharply from 46.68 in the 1950s to 0.11 in 2022, albeit with a small uptick since then. There are many contributors to this stellar track record, including transformative developments in technology. For instance, very rarely do engine failures contribute to air accidents anymore. That is because the failure rates of modern jet engines have become infinitesimally small.

Sadly, the biggest cause of aviation incidents is invariably human error, almost always resulting from a chain of events and the compounding of many small mistakes, rather than single, big, catastrophic errors.