Comments on: Could the credit crunch affect air passenger safety

By: Darren Cronian

Darren Cronian — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 17:23:49 +0000

Apologies — I have edited the original post with hindsight I should have been more careful about how I worded the post. I was trying to make the point that could the credit crunch have an impact on air passenger duty.

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By: Stuart

Stuart — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 14:39:09 +0000

Hi Darren, I was actually writing a summary of news coverage on the crash when your blogpost popped up on my feeder… hence my quick initial post! Agree, one shouldn’t believe everything one reads, unfortunately there’s so many sources out there it’s difficult to know what to credit – esp on a breaking story like this.

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By: Cay

Cay — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 13:43:52 +0000

I really feel sorry for all these people. It had to be terrible to fly somewhere and to die… I start to get nervous.. I have to fly soon from Seoul to Ukraine… Every time people fly, they risk.. though statistics says air planes crash not so often as cars..

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By: Darren Cronian

Darren Cronian — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 12:53:14 +0000

@ Stuart

You obviously know your stuff on airlines! Thanks I’ll check the link out. I learnt a valuable lesson this week; when struggling for time, don’t use the media newspaper sites for stats and information to help write blog posts. Very inaccurate, and the information differs depending what you read.

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By: Stuart

Stuart — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 11:54:32 +0000

Yes, it’s true the MD80 series is a “derivative” of the DC9.

BUT, the reason airlines are phasing them out isn’t because they’re unsafe, but rather because they’re gas-guzzlers — some models of a Boeing 737 will use around 20% less gas to fly the same distance.

While there has been a few accidents in recent times, the 1-2-Go one in Phuket springs to mind — few have been tied back to problems with the aircraft. In fact the MD 80 series is considered to be a particularly safe aircraft to fly in. There’s a good NYT blog entry about this that quotes Boeing (admitedly not unbiased!) as saying in part:

“Measured by accident data alone, the MD-80 is considered to be one of the safest planes in the sky. According to Boeing, the plane has a fatal hull loss rate — meaning a crash involving fatalities — of 0.34 per one million departures, and an overall hull-loss, or crash, rate of 0.52 per million departures. By comparison, the average record for all commercial jets is 0.89 fatal hull losses per million departures, and an overall rate of 1.64 hull losses per million departures, Boeing said.”

http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/08/20/the-long-checkered-career-of-the-md-80/

I’d say it’s way too early yet to know what caused the crash — latest reports seem to be indicating the airplane didn’t even leave the ground, rather an engine caught fire and it careened off the runway… but think prob still a lot of guesswork at this stage.

All that said, an aircraft, just like my old VW, when well maintained and loved, should remain safe for decades — as for an old design — if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!

Spanair’s maintenance procedures, rather than the particular type of aircraft, would be my armchair guess as to the root cause…

Re the American thing, it wasn’t a withdrawal, rather maintenance that American hadn’t done (despite being told to) and so when the FAA through a fit about it, AA had to ground the aircraft to do the tasks asap.

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