Spring Break is a period enjoyed by students across the country as a glimmer of fun before the looming fourth quarter. This year, however, back-to-back plane crashes have shaken the world and thrust thousands of vacations into uncertainty. Civil Air Patrol cadet and senior Andrew Xuan addresses and responds to that uncertainty with a perspective grounded in experience.
Xuan graduated from the Texas Wing Glider Flight Academy this past summer, where he logged time in the air and ground school. He also holds a Student Pilot Certificate, a pilot’s equivalent of a Learner’s Permit issued by the FAA.
“From the perspective of someone who has actually flown, I think that despite the recent crashes, air travel remains a very safe mode of transportation,” Xuan said. “During my time at the flight academy, safety was the number one emphasis. We had checklists for everything, from preflight inspections to landing, and we took part in regular safety briefings.”
Despite the gravity of the recent incidents, Xuan says that they are nothing more than unfortunate yet isolated tragedies. The air is still a safe domain, and the recent crashes shouldn’t reduce faith in the aviation industry as a whole.
“Crashes tend to receive a lot of media attention due to their usually higher casualty rate and because they’re not as common, which actually proves this point,” Xuan said. “Also, modern planes have highly advanced safety features. Because of this, I’m confident air travel remains very safe.”
However, the complex systems in place bring to question how such catastrophic disasters have occurred. This begs the question, however, with such complex systems in place, how could such catastrophic disasters have occurred?
“It’s all about communication. For example, the recent crash at the Reagan airport in DC was a miscommunication between air traffic control and the people in the air,” sophomore Paul Sumethasorn said. “The air traffic control alerted the helicopter of an airplane, but while the helicopter saw one, it wasn’t the one that he’d been warned about, so he crashed.”
Sumethasorn emphasizes that the issue was primarily one of communication and that through further attentiveness and efforts, the inevitability of human error can be reduced, an example of this being the recent Delta Air Lines save in Canada.
“The design of the plane was made pretty well,” Sumethasorn said. “So despite hard crosswinds making it tip to the side, the fact that the wings were designed to break under stress and not rip open the fuselage as well as the training of the crew stopped things from being worse.”
Ultimately, there is always a risk during any form of transportation, especially a mode as potentially hazardous as flying, and the meticulous attitude, a standard in the aviation industry, makes such hazards minimal.
