AirAsia flight QZ8501 disappearance caps difficult year for airline industry

Number of fatal incidents involving large passenger jets is at record low but nature of disasters has been a wake-up call

Search and rescue teams coordinate the search area for flight QZ8501. Photograph: Oscar Siagian/Getty Images

Despite the fact that flying remains, as the aviation industry likes to stress, statistically the safest form of transport, the likely loss of a third airliner in the space of 10 months appears to have made 2014 the deadliest year for passengers in almost a decade.

The still unexplained disappearance of Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 in March and the shooting down of the same airline’s flight MH17 over war-torn eastern Ukraine four months later cost 239 and 298 lives respectively.

Now it appears probable that another 162 fatalities will be added to the year’s toll. Although it remains unclear exactly what happened to AirAsia flight QZ8501, authorities are relatively certain they will find tragic confirmation at the bottom of the Java Sea.

Until this week’s loss, the safety record of major airlines had been on a fairly constant upward trajectory since 2005 on most counts. According to the Flight Safety Foundation, there has been a steady fall in the number of airline crashes, and the number of fatal incidents involving large passenger jets this year was 19, a record low in modern aviation (their count excludes the shooting down of MH17 as a military action).

But the Bureau of Aircraft Accident Archives, which includes smaller planes and military transport planes, puts the total number of fatalities for 2014 at 1,320, assuming no survivors from QZ8501 – the worst annual toll since 2005.

The fact that three incidents have accounted for the majority of fatalities could, on one level, bolster the industry message of increased safety. The big European short-haul carriers such as Ryanair and easyJet can still boast an accident-free history. But in an era when the trend appeared to point to a zero-casualty future, the nature of this year’s catastrophes has been a nasty wake-up call.
The International Air Transport Association, Iata, which represents most large airlines worldwide, as recently as 2012 boasted of an zero annual crash record – or zero “western-built jet hull losses” – among its members. Safety and security remained an ongoing concern, and no one at Iata betrayed any sense of complacency. In some parts of the world, such as Africa, incident rates were far higher, if falling. There was work to do on limiting “runway excursions”, which accounted for the majority of accidents.

But the message was fairly clear: if you flew on a on a new plane with a major airline that had signed up to the safety standards, you could more or less relax. Now, two Boeing 777 airliners flown by a major scheduled carrier, Malaysia Airlines – British Airways’ partner in OneWorld – from major hubs have met their end. The Airbus A320 lost by AirAsia is a plane that dots the skies from Heathrow to Honolulu.

The industry response to the new categories of disaster thrown up by MH370 and MH17 has been to assemble taskforces to report to the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO), a UN oversight body, with recommendations for possible future action on flight tracking and on sharing information about overflying conflict zones.
The plethora of chilling scenarios conjured up by the disappearance of MH370 should keep driving the search for its wreckage. It seems there are few parallels with QZ8501, but should there be any sizeable duration before the latest lost plane is found, the industry’s ponderous moves on aircraft tracking could look like unpardonable foot-dragging.

While the priority given to safety is a knee-jerk mantra recited by all airline executives, an acceptable level of risk versus cost has to infuse all industry thinking, especially in a business whose profit margins in recent years have been slim. The calculations run from how tired your pilots can be to how little you can pay your crew, to whether you really need that state-of-the-art tracking system. How many airlines really need to invest in the all-frills package touted by Inmarsat? What chance of any plane escaping detection given the various tracking systems in place? But then the unthinkable happened.

The upbeat assessment is that air crashes are ever rarer, and so we simply perceive them more closely. Tracking websites show every plane’s path, the global 24-hour news cycle provides footage of grieving relatives, while transport ministers and celebrity airline executives tweet their movements in real time. Should pilot error in a freakishly bad storm have sent flight QZ8501 to the bottom of the Java Sea, it will be recorded as another unhappy episode in Indonesia’s troubled aviation history. The real nightmare scenario for the industry is that once again the reason remains unknown – with at least one expert warning that the technology in planes or traffic control systems could prove susceptible to a cyber threat.