AstroBlonde

This night I dreamt that I was flying, as a passanger, on an airplane. I looked out the window and saw a meteorite flying by just a couple of meters away from the airplane. My reaction was, of course, "holy shit!" but I can't remember much more than that.

Woke up in the morning with a curiosity of how the airplane statistics looks this year. In media we've read about the Air France crash alot, but after that the news became silent. So I turned to my favourite site for airplane statistics Plane Crash Info.com.

If you click in "Go To Database" and "2009" you see all the accidents that have happened during 2009 so far. As expected there are alot of small airplane accidents but I'm not really interested in those. I mainly fly with big airplanes, except that really small propeller plane I flew with from Tenerefe to La Palma and back. Brr, horrible!

Jan 15, New York, New York US Airways, Airbus A320-214 N106US, 0 people dead out of 155.

I remember that accident very well. It's the Hudson accident, where they had to land in the Hudson river. When that accident happened I was on an airplane from Frankfurt to Singapore, on my way to Sydney. I saw the news about it on TV at Singapore airport, not the type of news you wanna see when you're going up again.

Feb 25, Amsterdam, Netherlands Turkish Airlines, Boeing 737-8F2 TC-JGE, 9 people dead out of 134.

I remember this one as well. I was on my way to Spain when that accident happened. I was going to the NOT observatory in La Palma to observe for 8 nights.

May 20, Near Madiun, Indonesia Military - Indonesian Air Force, Lockheed C-130 Hercules A-1325, 98 people dead out of 112.
Jun 1, Atlantic Ocean, 570 miles northeast of Natal, Brazil Air France, Airbus A330-203 F-GZCP, all 228 people dead.

The last one is the famous Air France accident that media was all crazy about.

Jun 30, Off Mitsamiouli, Comoros, Yemenia Airway, Airbus A310-324 7O-ADJ, 1 person survived out of 153.
Jul 15, Near Qazvin, Iran Caspian Airlines, Tupolev 154M EP-CPG, all 168 people died.

Ok, let's take a look how many accidents of these types we had in 2008.
We have 4 accidents in 2008 with 100 passengers or more. That is not many at all if you compare to the number of airplanes that fly every year, so no need to panic! In 2007 we had 5 accidents with 100 passengers of more. In 2006 we had 6 accidents, so one can say that so far, by just looking at these numbers, we've had about the average numbers of accidents in 2009. We know that in the end of 2008 and during 2009 the world economy was crashing, so it's nice to see that the airlines still seem to value safety as number one.

Ok, let's take a look at the aircrafts. We have

Airbus A320. Seems like that plane type was manufactured in 1988. (21 years)
Boeing 737. Seems like manufactured in 1967. (42 years)
Lockheed C-130 Hercules A-1325. That is a military transport aircraft and normally people don't fly in one of those when travelling. Let's exclude it.
Airbus A330. Seems like manufactured in 1992. (17 years)
Airbus A310. Seems like manufactured in 1982. (27 years)
Tupolev Tu-154M. Seems like manufactured in 1987. (22 years)

So, let's see if my dad was right. He used to work at Arlanda, the airport of Stockholm, as a civil engineer. He basically constructed electronics to cockpit and had a team install it. He knew quite alot about airplanes in gereral and he always said that the 25-year old airplanes are more safe than the newer ones. I remember it very clearly because logically that felt wrong for me. He said that the mechanicals are checked very often but the electronics are harder to check. It occurs in special situations and with the old airplanes we've already corrected the electronic errors, because there have been so many flights where the pilots have rapported these faults. With the new airplanes, we don't know much about the electronic components. They have been tested alot, but we need more flights to know if the electronic components are working good together.

If we look at how old these airplanes are we see that alot of them are around 20 years old. The numbers here may not be totally correct either, because I'm guessing that these airplane types have been manufactured during a couple of years or so. It is therefore very likely that the airplanes are even younger than these numbers.
But for this year it sure looks like my dad had a point. If you look at 2008 there were more Airbus accidents than Boeing, but if you look at 2007 we had more Boeings accidents. In 2006 there were more Airbus accidents again. I looked a little closer to the accidents in 2006 and found out that EVERY accident (with passengers more than 100) was due to pilot error or flight tower error. The human error in other words. In 2007 there seem to be one technical error that caused the accident, and the plane was just 6 months old. The rest of the accidents seem to be human errors. In 2008 we can see human errors as well. In 2009 we had a little more technical errors, such as engine failures after hitting birds and faulty altimeter. For the France Air accident the final report has not been published yet, as far as I know. But from the received messages indicating a failure of the electrical system you can perhaps assume that they had problems with the electrical system.

So, my conclusions are that it's really safe to fly with an airplane if you compare it to driving a car or just walking over the street. There are 12 months in every year which makes accidents happen every

2nd months in 2006
2-3 months in 2007
3rd months in 2008
2nd months in 2009

if you just look at the math. I can't see any changes between weather seasons in the statistics. Most of the accidents are due to human errors so to make any conclusions about the plane types or how old they are you need to look at the statistics for a longer period than I did here. As my dad would say "The accidents are mostly caused by shit behind the steering wheel". I guess I still have to assume that he knew what he was talking about and trust him in the airplanes age matter. It seems like most of the accidents happen during take off or landing, which is no surprise to me. My dad said that pilots often start and land by themself, even though they can do this using the autopilot, because they want to have "some fun" and also keep their skills up. The human error is the biggest problem with accidents and therefore it's no surprise to me that the most accidents happen during take off or landing.

So, a guess would be that there will be another airplane accident perhaps in November or December this year if you just consider that airplane accidents happen every 2-3 months. Also, there have been as many accindents this year already as it has been the last couple of years so it's also possible that the next airplane accident will happen in January or February. At the same time it's really hard to make any assumtions out of this, so don't take it too serious. It is still very safe to fly!

Note: I've just guessed an accident to happen 4 months out of 12. :D Also, an accident has already occured the date, but another year, I'm leaving for Sydney which makes half of my flight look better statistically. The other half is not as good statistically. :)