KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia (AFP) — If you weren’t already nervous about flying that may have changed in 2014, a year that stirred our deepest fears about modern jet travel despite shaping up as one of the safest in aviation history.
The tragic dramas surrounding Malaysia Airlines and AirAsia played out before unprecedented global television and Internet audiences, confronting the travelling public with the startling truth that planes can be shot down or simply disappear.
The events triggered the first major worldwide reviews of aviation precautions in years, and gave ‘aerophobes’ a new reason to tense up on take-off.
“I always disliked flying but now it’s a real ordeal,” said Marie Lefebvre, a Bangkok-based Canadian businesswoman who has curtailed her frequent business travel. She now occasionally takes sedatives before take-off.
“It’s that feeling of helplessness. Some of the things this year were terrifying.”
Exhibit A was MH370, which took its place alongside Amelia Earhart’s vanishing as one of aviation’s great mysteries, a buzzword for the terror of vanishing without a trace.
The Boeing 777 disappeared on March 8 with 239 people aboard after its communications systems were apparently deliberately shut off. No trace of it has been found.
It remains unknown whether an on-board emergency, hijack, rogue pilots, fire among lithium batteries in its hold, or other less-plausible theories were responsible.
Four months later, MH17 was blown out of the sky over Ukraine, killing all 298 aboard and stoking superpower rivalries when the West accused Russia-backed rebels of downing it with a missile.
The following week, the crashes of a TransAsia Airways flight amid rough weather in the Taiwan Strait and Air Algerie flight 5017 in Mali for reasons still unknown killed a combined 164 people, giving the impression planes were literally falling from the skies.
Capping off the disastrous year, an AirAsia jet carrying 162 people apparently crashed on Sunday en route from Surabaya in Indonesia’s east Java to Singapore.
The flight lost contact during stormy weather and Indonesian authorities have since spotted debris believed to be from the plane, as well as what they believe to be the bodies of passengers.
Ironically, however, 2014 continued a long-term trend of improving air safety.
A record low of seven fatal commercial passenger incidents, not including AirAsia, occurred this year, according to the Netherlands-based Aviation Safety Network, an infinitesimal figure amid the several million flights and billions of passengers each year.
There were 15 such accidents last year, while the annual average since 1946 is 32.
“It’s so safe now that incidents tend to be more mysterious and striking because crashes only happen in extremely rare circumstances,” Gerry Soejatman, a Jakarta-based aviation consultant, said in comments made prior to the AirAsia incident.
“That’s why this year had such an impact. Accidents are so rare that we magnify those that occur.”
However, fatalities were up sharply to 762, the highest in four years, and could rise to 924 if all the AirAsia passengers are declared dead.
There was a record low of 224 deaths last year.
Despite the headlines, air traffic has been unaffected.
Total passenger miles travelled grew a solid 5.8 per cent from January-October, the International Air Transport Association (IATA) said this month, forecasting another solid year ahead.
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