Sir - I refer to the Airline Safety Review (Flight International, 17-23 January), which gives a table of the most common reasons for airline accidents.
The top five causes (aircrew error, controlled flight into terrain, weather, loss of control, engine failure/fire) can all be brought together, under one heading: malfunctioning of the crew. Weather and engine failure/fire may look like intruders but they are not. Weather in itself, is never the real cause of an accident, it is a misjudgment of the weather conditions, which brings accidents about.
The statistics for fatal airline accidents in 1995 tells us that the paramount cause for crashes is human error.
How can this be explained in an era of sophisticated electronic-training equipment, ergonomic cockpits, over-performance aircraft, reliable engines and navigation equipment that almost never fails?
The answer is simple: there is nothing wrong with the crews, it is the air transport business, which is speeding down the wrong road.
Today, as aircraft manufacturers go to the limits to make ever better aircraft, and airline staffs do the same to arrive at almost faultless operation, airline chiefs persist in selling the airline ticket (which by its very nature is an expensive product) at an unrealistically low price. How do they do it? By cutting down cost in areas too complicated for the public to understand: flight operations and maintenance.
In the Western world, the cost-cutting rage is still kept within safe borders by the stiff resistance of the pilot and engineers associations. For how long, nobody knows. In the rest of the world, borders are very fragile or they do not exist any more. Commerce at any price is the only rule. In these places airliners fall out of the sky regularly, killing and injuring hundreds of people. The major cause, is called crew malfunction by some its real name, is airline-management malfunction.
WILFRIED MOMMAERTS
Tildonk, Belgium
Source: Flight International
