One time you had to travel weeks by a horse or caravan to reach your destination. One time you would have sailed for a month or more to cross the Atlantic ocean. Nowadays you still need a lot of hours by train or bus for a journey across the European continent. However with an airplane traveling is totally different…. One can travel across continents in a few hours and can reach almost every destination easily and relaxed. Definitely the airliners have changed the way we travel, the way we move. The world of transportation changed because of the air travels.

However airplanes fall, they keep falling from the sky and raise concerns more and more among travelers. Meanwhile the airplane is considered the safest  mean of transportation. Its riskier to travel with a motorbike or a car, than a airplane. Furthermore more people die on the asphalt every year, than those who are involved in a flying accident. The above concerns about air travels safety have to do with the limited chances of survival in an airplane crash. Let’s face it, there are not many major airplane accidents we have heard of, that were not lethal.

Over the last years 2 years a significant larger number of airplanes crashed and hundreds of people gone perished. Today another airplane crash occurred, as an Airbus A 320 of Egypt Air wast lost from the radar. Latest news talk about personal belonging and pieces from the aircraft found in the sea, miles away of Alexandria. One more disaster, one of so many. Do you want to start counting? From 2014, these were the biggest aviation disasters:

2014

• Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, March 8, Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, a Boeing 777 that disappeared from the radar. 227 passengers and 12 crew members on board dead.
• Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, July 17, Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, a Boeing 777 that was shot down over Ukraine, 283 passengers and 15 crew members on board dead.
• Air Algérie Flight 5017, July 24, Burkina Faso to Algiers, a McDonnell Douglas MD-83 that crashed in the Mali desert, 110 passengers and 6 crew members on board dead.
• Indonesia AirAsia Flight 8501, December 28, Surabaya, Indonesia to Singapore, an Airbus A320 that crashed in Borneo, 155 passengers and 7 crew members on board dead.

Photo source: upload.wikimedia.org

2015

•  Germanwings Flight 9525, March 24, Barcelona to Düsseldorfan, an Airbus A320 that crashed in France as a result of a deliberate act by the pilot, 144 passengers and 6 crew members on board dead.
• Metrojet Flight 9268, October 31, Sharm-El-Sheikh to Saint Petersburg, anAirbus A321 that exploded due to a terrorist bomb, 224 passengers and 7 crew members on board dead.

2016

• Flydubai Flight 981, March 19, Dubai to Rostova, a Boeing 737-800 that crashed while landing in poor weather, 55 passengers and 7 crew members on board dead.
• EgyptAir Flight 804, May 19, Paris to Cairo, an Airbus A320 that disappead from radar over the Mediterranean Sea. 56 passengers and 10 crew on board, all presumed dead.

Photo of the missing airplane

Photo source: bbc.co.uk

Now imagine that these are only the major aviation disasters, counting more that 50 people dead. There were many others with a small number of victims and fortunately a few minor accidents, where all the passengers and crew members survived, even with injuries. But still we are talking about more than 1257 people that died…

So why do airplanes fall??

There are many reasons. Either they have to do with flaws in the construction of various parts of the airplane or with the mistakes made by the pilot. In both these occasions, passengers can only hope that others just do their job right. On the one hand, people want to believe that the manufacturers construct the airliners following all the security precautions during construction and on the other, that the airlines hire, train and test their pilots in such a way, that they minimize the involvement of the  human factor in an accident. Unfortunately, over the last years, one more reason became more and more popular. Terrorism…  Terrorism tends to a part of our everyday routine, as a lot of attacks happened. Furthermore, apart from those poor people that died, all the rest start suffering from the most dangerous feeling. The fear.

Photo source: thinklink.com

An act of terror is the very first reason of a plane crash that comes to our minds, even if eventually has nothing to do with the incident itself. We live in a world, where fear starts spreading more and more and nobody knows what this situation will bring! The media, more than anyone else, tend to present the news without, sometimes, having a clear view of the story itself. And the fear keeps spreading…But this has to stop. We have to move on without fear in our hearts. All those attacks, the way that they are presented from the media, want to cause more fear among us. And with fear we will become reluctant to travel with an airplane, tomorrow with a car and who knows, maybe some time later we might fear to go out of our houses. What i know is that after every story that involves an aviation disaster, everyone talks either about terrorism or about his or hers decision to stop flying, at least for a while.

The progress in journeys, that aviation managed over the last decades, got hit seriously and people seek the insurance that once the airplanes offered. As for me, i am not going to fear. Whenever i will have to travel by airplane i will do it. Because i respect and love the technology, i trust all those people working to make airplanes safer and because i strongly believe that terrorism doesn’t lead anywhere. Other that that i just feel that all we need is simply good luck, in the form of the absence of any bad circumstances.

Keep traveling, keep flying….

If you liked the article, please share it with friends and follow the blog. The power of the blog is its readers….. its you.

Photo source: egyptianstreets.com