In a dispatch from Audra Ang of the Associated Press, we heard Chaisak Angsuwan, director general of Thailand's Air Transport Authority, say that the jetliner "lost balance and crashed." Pardon me for getting all semantic, but airplanes do not "balance" in the air. So long as lift is sufficient, flight is a very stable thing, even in the roughest turbulence. If lift is not sufficient, a plane will stall. But it does not "lose balance."
The same article also included accounts of passengers kicking out windows to escape the burning fuselage. They may have tried, but I doubt they succeeded. Aircraft windows need to withstand the forces of pressurization, which can exceed a thousand pounds of force per pane. Unless those windows were already damaged, even a panicked person would have a mighty hard time generating enough strength to dislodge one.
Ang's piece finishes with a somewhat oblique indictment of One-Two-Go and its ill-fated MD-82: "Many budget airlines use older planes that have been leased or purchased after years of use by other airlines." Not surprisingly, the accident has touched off debate on the safety of upstart foreign carriers. Civil aviation is expanding rapidly around the globe, with a slew of airlines popping up across Asia. There is plenty worth discussing, but this "older planes" aspect is chiefly a red herring.
Ang's statement is accurate -- many budget airlines do use older, secondhand planes. But so do most of the world's largest and safest airlines. The MD-82 at Phuket, seen here about two weeks before the mishap, was manufactured in 1983. (The MD-80 series is a derivative of the '60s-era Douglas DC-9.) That's fairly old, but there are aircraft just as elderly, or considerably more so, in the fleets of United, American, Delta, Northwest, FedEx, UPS and numerous others. The myth that older airframes are inherently unsafe has been tackled in this column on several occasions. They are not.
Granted, they need quality care and attention in order to stay that way. That requires money, skilled workers and effective regulatory oversight -- distinct challenges for small-time budget carriers in second- and third-world countries. But crash records don't reveal any significant, airframe-related patterns among young foreign airlines. Consider the players in some of the most notorious accidents during the past few years: One-Two-Go, Lion Air, Adam Air, Flash Airlines, Kam Air, Gol, TAM, TANS, Mandala Airlines, Helios Airways, Western Caribbean Airways. The aircraft involved were a pretty even mix of newer and older.
Fleet age is only part of the equation. In the end, it's the intangibles that make the difference: dedication and commitment.
Unfortunately for the consumer, ciphering out which airlines best embody these traits is extremely difficult. Of those names listed above, most are, or were, minor carriers lacking established pedigrees, operating in second- or third-world countries. But none of those factors, alone or together, is necessarily a red flag. Trustworthy airlines come in all shapes and sizes. Some are new, others have been flying for decades. Some are big, others are tiny. The "budget" tag is no giveaway -- in the United States, cheapo Southwest is the only major to have never had a full-blown crash. And neither is geography. Among the prejudices we need to overcome is a presumption that airlines of the developing world are, by their very nature, risky -- a tendency that is both offensive and statistically unsound. Some of the most impressive records hail from the globe's poorest, remotest corners -- LAB of Bolivia, Air Jamaica, Mexicana, Tunisair.
Of course, many airlines are too young to have meaningful records, and so they are especially tough to judge. A truly effective audit would require delving deep into training policies, maintenance records and company culture -- an almost impossible task from afar.
When there's little else to go on, trust your instincts. Get a "feel" for an airline by checking out its Web site and surfing through the comments left on travel blogs. But if and when things get murky, you should probably give the airline the benefit of the doubt. To reiterate a point I've made in the past, there is virtually no such thing as a "dangerous" airline. Not in Thailand, not in Africa, not anywhere. That is by no means an excuse for shoddy oversight, subpar maintenance or the poor quality of training inevitably uncovered at some companies, but let it remind you that flying is, on the whole, exceptionally safe even at its worst. Some airlines will always be safer than others, but in practical terms, exploring minute degrees of difference gives us little useful data. One carrier suffers three crashes in a 10-year period; another, two crashes. Considering that individual carriers make tens of thousands of departures ever year, that's not telling us much. Should a single error, or a stroke of bad luck, determine which is "safer"?
I know, fearful fliers out there want more than that. They want something definite and unambiguous, along the lines of: Avoid all non-U.S. and European airlines that have been in business for under 10 years. But that would be neither fair nor accurate. There are no blanket statements that apply.
This is possibly in poor taste, but I imagine more than one of the doomed passengers on Phuket had taken a look at the One-Two-Go logo on his or her ticket and wondered, with a roll of the eyes, "What am I getting myself into?"
That's a reasonable question with a complicated answer.
GO-AROUNDS
Re: Fuel on the fire
As an engineer who makes a living cleaning up fuel spills, I have to point out the error in the Patrick Smith's use of the phrase "highly volatile jet fuel." Jet fuel, more specifically Jet-A, is 99 percent kerosene, which consists mostly of semivolatile petroleum hydrocarbon compounds. The term "volatility" refers to the speed at which a compound evaporates, not to explosiveness. Jet fuel is far less volatile than the gasoline you put in your car.
-- Dave the Engineer.
The author responds:
"Volatile" is one of those words we don't really stop to consider, but you're right. "Flammable," maybe, was the better choice of adjectives. What makes this gaffe annoying is that I specifically addressed the nonvolatility of jet fuel in a past column, and there's a segment in my book about it also. While I wouldn't recommend trying it, you can hold a lighted match directly above an open tank of Jet-A, and it will not ignite. Once the fuel atomizes, however, such as during a crash, or otherwise comes in direct contact with an ignition source, it obviously burns quite fiercely.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Do you have questions for Salon's aviation expert? Send them to AskThePilot and look for answers in a future column.
Related Stories
Ask the pilot
Lessons from a burning plane: What the media didn't tell you about a near disaster in Asia.
Ask the pilot
From Clickair to CrazyJet, a meditation on the
troubled state of airline names.
Story finder (3 ways to search Salon)
Salon Directory (browse by topic)