history

Forty-five years of airline safety analysis

David Learmount Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

For more than 50 years Flight International/FlightGlobal has been publishing a review of world airline safety performance annually, but for the last 45 of them I have been the compiler and author. The most recent review – containing analysis and a list of all the fatal and many of the significant non-fatal airline accidents in 2025 – can be found here on FlightGlobal’s website.

My first safety review for Flight International magazine covered the year 1980. A few years later, in 1985, I reported on the worst year in aviation history in terms of the number of passengers and crew killed: 2,230 deaths in 41 fatal accidents. Last year the figures were respectively 420 and 11, despite the fact that the number of airline passengers carried is now about four times what it was in 1980, and the number of flights has increased about three-fold.

So where are we today in terms of airline safety performance? Obviously massively better than it was in the 1980s, but by comparison with the annual figures in the most recent decade, 2025’s numbers were slightly lower than the average for fatal accidents, and rather higher than the average (276) for the number of annual fatalities.

FlightGlobal/Flight International explains: “The principal reason for the relatively high casualty numbers – a total of 420 for the year – was that more than half of them died in a single, catastrophic crash involving an Air India Boeing 787-8 after departing Ahmedabad International airport on 12 June.”

Flight concedes, however, that “2025 was an unremarkable year – statistically – for fatal accidents.” And those most recent ten-year figures have been remaining fairly constant around a historic best-ever level, so any useful safety review needs to ask what the industry is getting right, as well as studying the mistakes.

The article debates in detail whether the action by one of the Air India pilots of closing both the engines’ fuel control switches seconds after take-off from Ahmedabad was an extraordinary mistake or a deliberate act (as does my previous piece in this blog). The Indian Air Accident Investigation Bureau confirms the pilot’s act of shutting off the fuel, and within about a year its report should be able to provide a verdict on why he did it.

Summing up safety in 2025, FlightGlobal said: “Apart from the Air India loss, almost all the ­accidents can be considered to have been “traditional” in nature. That is, they were caused by exposure to ordinary threats such as bad weather, pilots taking avoidable risks, or errors of omission or commission, bird-strikes, turbulence encounters and maintenance shortcomings.”

One of the primary reasons air travel is so much safer than it used to be is that the aircraft and engines are better engineered than they were forty years ago, and smart avionics give the crews more information presented more intuitively. There is a parallel between engineering advances in the avation and automotive industries. Anyone who owns a new car today recognises that its reliability and its technology is much better than cars built in the 1980s.

The theoretical downside of “smarter” aircraft is that they are highly computerised and thus more complex, but in practice that concern is not borne out because the systems are so reliable they rarely go wrong, and they are self-monitoring so the pilots are kept informed of systems health.

The human factors worry is that the sheer reliability means pilots may be lulled into a comfortable, non-critical mindset, so when something does go wrong they are startled and may react inappropriately. Again – theoretically – there is more that can go wrong because aircraft may still be traditional mechanical machines, but they are overlaid with software-driven sensors and computerised flight management systems. On the rare occasions when these go wrong, however, the crew may be confronted with a problem that has never presented before, so there is no checklist to deal with it.

For that reason, today’s crews in their basic training are still confronted with traditional problems like engine failure, but their advanced and continuation training is designed to inculcate a resilient mindset, based on flight priorities, paticularly when something unidentified has gone wrong: 1. Aviate, 2. Navigate, 3. Communicate.

Aviate: is the aircraft flying at the appropriate speed, height and attitude? Navigate: what is the aircraft’s position, is it heading in the direction it should be, and what is the fuel state? Communicate: report your situation to ATC, then work with other crew to deternine the best course of action to deal with the problem, and tell the cabin crew chief what is going on. Finally, while dealing with the problem, revisit your priorities over and over again: are you aviating right, are you navigating right, are you communicating what people need to know?

On this theme of training pilots to interface with the aircraft’s systems, the air transport industry – like all others – has to prepare to make good use of the next level of information technology: artificial intelligence (AI). In a thoughtful paper entitled Artificial Intelligence in Aviation, IFALPA (International Federation of Airline Pilot Associations) warns the industry to be ready to use AI with care to support the piloting task. It advises: “The role of AI in the operation of a flight should always be to support the humans in the system”, adding: “For this to be effective, whatever the intended capability of an AI system, it should only present options to a pilot, never a fixed outcome. There should also be transparency to the pilot as to how these options have been selected, and the level of confidence associated with them.”

2025 may have played out with a relatively small number of low-tech airline accidents, but we have to be ready for something different, and hopefully even better.

Boeing 737: the beginning of the end.

David Learmount Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

It hasn’t surprised anyone in the industry to hear rumours – via the pages of the Wall Street Journal – that Boeing is working on the design of a new narrowbody jet, because it’s what everyone – including Boeing – knows the manufacturer should have done instead of launching the 737 Max.

The confidence in that statement is completely un-influenced by hindsight.

Now the Max has been purged of the ghastly design mistake that was MCAS (manoeuvring characteristics augmentation system), and Boeing has radically overhauled its corporate safety culture under a new leader – former Rockwell Collins engineer CEO Kelly Ortberg – the 737 series can once again trade on the lazy confidence that comes from the fact that – with all its faults and its antique technology – it’s a known quantity.

As a result the 737 is selling well, but nothing like as well as its competitor the Airbus A320 series.

The first 737-100 entered service in 1968, initially to fly the routes that the larger 727 series trijet was too big for. Its basic control technology was – and still is – just-post-war, except that in the latest versions the power-assisted cranks and pulleys are overlaid with electronic flight instrument systems and flight management computers to the extent that the pilots could almost believe the aircraft is fly-by-wire. They know, however, that they themselves are the flight envelope protection.

The industry needs a new-technology narrowbody competitor to the A320, and if Boeing doesn’t supply it, perhaps a development of China’s Comac C919, Russia’s Sukhoi Superjet 100, or a new product from Brazil’s Embraer will fill the gap.

Boeing’s first fly-by-wire airliner was its highly successful 777 widebody, which entered service in 1995 with virtually no birthing pains.

In 2011 it launched the 787 Dreamliner series, also highly commercially successful, but suffering from multiple early problems, some of them still being worked on.

Right now Boeing is struggling to re-launch the 777 as the 777X. The fact that it had a planned 2019 in-service date, but now its launch customer – Lufthansa – will not receive it until 2026, suggests how difficult a task bringing an entirely new narrowbody (the 797?) to service readiness may yet be.

The challenge is always to deliver a safe, trouble-free product, but the staggeringly advanced, fully-integrated electronic technology by which the aircraft and all its systems will be managed and controlled, plus the fact that there must be fallback systems that the pilots can access easily if it all goes wrong, mean its service entry will not be quick.

Look beyond this to the fact that the new systems will inevitably employ artificial intelligence, which makes passengers – and even engineers – nervous when it comes to managing safety-critical systems, and the size of the challenge becomes clear.

So the venerable 737 series will be with us for many years yet.

Air India suffers the first fatal crash involving a 787

David Learmount Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Boeing’s long-range widebody 787 has been in service since 2013, and had some worrying technical problems in early service. Those, however, were corrected and it had been crash-free until now.

There has been very little information for investigators to work with since the Air India 787-8 crashed just after take-off from Ahmedabad today.

There are reports of an urgent Mayday call from the crew during the brief airborne period. The 787 appears to have reached a maximum height of about 600ft before descending, wings-level, in a nose-high attitude, to impact with buildings about 1.5nm from the runway’s end. An explosion followed, resulting from the large amount of fuel on board contacting hot engine parts when the crash breached the fuel tanks. The aircraft had been fuelled for the scheduled ten-hour flight to London Gatwick.

Powered by twin GE Aerospace GEnx engines, the 787-8 took off from Ahmedabad at 13:40 local time in good weather, carrying 242 passengers and crew. Initial reports from the site indicate that all on board died except for a single passenger who was thrown clear, and has survived. There are expected to be many casualties on the ground, but the numbers are not known at present.

Looking at a video of the last few seconds of the flight, the landing gear still remains down, the flaps look as if they are still at a take-off setting – but the video quality is so poor that cannot be stated with certainty – and the aircraft is in a steady descent which only ended in impact with buildings and the ground.

At this point after take-off, the gear would normally have been retracted and the aircraft would have been climbing rapidly. The steady descent actually witnessed in the video suggests the crew could not command sufficient power from the engines to keep the aircraft level, let alone to climb.

If that is true, what had happened to deprive the pilots of power from the engines? Had they suffered a multiple birdstrike that damaged both engines? No-one so far has reported a flock of birds in the departure path.

And failure of a single engine should not cause a crew to lose control of a modern airliner, even in the critical early climb phase. The video shows an aircraft that looks under control, but unable to climb.

Simultaneous engine failures for unconnected reasons simply do not happen, according to the entire history of aviation accidents. So if there was a failure of both, what could have caused it?

Frankly, we don’t know for certain in this case if engine power was the problem, but if you go looking for a potential cause of multiple engine failure, fuel contamination could do it. Again, however, history is against that potential cause in observed reality.

Could the pilots not demand the nose-up attitude they actually wanted because of some technical limitation? Well, that happened in the notorious 737 Max cases, but there is virtually no commonality in the way the 737 Series controls work and the manner in which the 787 Series operates.

So we have to wait for the investigators to report. These days, if the Indian investigators follow today’s recommended protocol, after about a month they will provide factual data of which they are certain, even if the final verdict is not yet clear. The aircraft’s “black boxes” – the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder – will provide data on what the aircraft actually did, and may throw some light on why it did it.

Meanwhile, be patient. This kind of accident is incredibly rare these days, and finding the truth behind it could not be more important.

Will the MH370 wreck be found this time?

David Learmount Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

If a new search of the southern Indian Ocean goes ahead as proposed, the expedition may clear up once and for all the most perplexing aviation mystery since the second world war: the fate of the missing Flight MH370, and all 239 people lost with it.

The majority of those on board the lost flight – which took off from Kuala Lumpur bound for Beijing more than ten years ago – were Malaysian or Chinese. Now Malaysian transport minister Anthony Loke has provisionally accepted a “no find, no fee” bid by Southampton, UK-based survey company Ocean Infinity, to search a new area of the remote southern Indian Ocean, where previously rejected data suggests the MH370 wreck could be resting on the sea bed.

Loke explained his rationale for a new search: “Our responsibility and obligation and commitment is to the next of kin…We hope [the search] this time will be positive, that the wreckage will be found and give closure to the families.”

Ocean Infinity vessels took part in a previous search near the planned fresh objective, but they were carried out under the direction of government agencies from Malaysia, China and Australia, and were unsuccessful. This time the company will be using independently supplied data from multiple expert sources, and it will consider alternative theories as to how the aircraft was directed in the last sector of its flight before it finally entered the ocean. This will take the search further south than Ocean Infinity’s vessels have scanned before.

On 8 March 2014, the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 took off from Kuala Lumpur on a scheduled flight to Beijing. Over the South China Sea, only 39 minutes into the flight, all radio communication with air traffic control was lost, and the aircraft’s data disappeared from ATC radar.

Military radar later revealed that, when it disappeared from ATC radar because the aircraft’s transponder had been switched off, MH370 almost did a U-turn and headed back across Malaysia, out into the northern Andaman Sea, and finally went out of radar range. What it did then has been the subject of endless speculation, but all plausible theories led to the south-eastern Indian Ocean, where the previous (unsuccessful) searches have taken place.

Since that time a few pieces of wreckage identified as part of the missing Boeing 777 have been found washed up on beaches around the Indian Ocean, thousands of miles from the aircraft’s flight planned route.

But the resting place of the wreckage and the remains of 239 people who had set off innocently on a commercial flight are, to this day, still undiscovered.

If the Malaysian government confirms its planned agreement with Ocean Infinity, the world may finally learn the fascinating truth about this mysterious flight.