Air safety concerns everyone. Whenever an airliner crashes or experiences, but survives, a significant malfunction, local and international investigators along with the aircraft’s manufacturers home in on the incident. The reason that, mile for mile, flying is the safest form of travel has everything to do with the determination of the airline industry as a whole to learn every lesson possible from a disaster or a near-disaster.
The tragic crash yesterday of an Indonesian airliner with the apparent loss of all 189 passengers and crew prompts the deepest sympathy for all the victims. But it should also cause anger and raise urgent questions about the competence of the airline company whose plane was involved.
The low-cost Indonesian carrier Lion Air has a bad safety record. Since it began operations 19 years ago there have been two major crashes, in 2004 when 25 people died on an internal flight and in 2013, when all 108 passengers and crew survived after an aircraft crashed into the sea at Bali International airport. Moreover, in 2011 and 2012, it was discovered that some Lion Air pilots had been using methamphetamines. It was possible the use of this dangerous drug may have been as a stimulant to keep them alert because of tiredness either from flying long hours or not taking internationally prescribed rest periods between flights. These issues clearly influenced EU regulators to ban Lion Air flights from European airspace until two years ago. Though its main business is domestic flights, the company also has international routes to the Middle East, Australia and elsewhere in Southeast Asia.
It would be entirely wrong to prejudge the findings of what is certain to be an exhaustive inquiry. This will include the recovery of the airframe from the seabed some 30 meters down off the coast near Jakarta. Yet over and above Lion Air’s dubious safety record, it already seems very likely that there was a technical issue with the brand new Boeing 737. The airline’s boss has admitted that on a previous flight there had been a problem but that this was fixed. It may be significant that among the dead was an as-yet-unidentified airline technician.
This is apparently the first crash involving a Boeing 737 Max since the US plane maker began selling the model in 2016 to an enthusiastic customer base of medium-haul operators. Boeing will take with the utmost seriousness the remotest possibility that the aircraft crashed because of some design flaw. And this is as it must be. Though modern airliners are hugely complex, the regulatory, operation and maintenance procedures that keep them safely in the air are clearly set down and well understood.
Yet Indonesia is not alone among emerging powerful economies where there appears to be a disconnect in the well-tried and tested air safety framework. Air India, for instance, stands number three in the least safe airline rankings. More often than not, corners are being cut somewhere. This may involve airline executives, managers or engineers. But it also has to include official inspectors and regulators who, be it because of corruption or incompetence, are not spotting problems and exercising their powers to ground aircraft or whole airlines that are flouting the rules. For countries that wish to assert their place in the world, such failures should be completely unacceptable.
