Sunday's tragedy of the Moscow to Irkutsk Aeroflot flight is a reminder that not only Third World airlines enjoy appalling safety records. Russia’s principal carrier has long been dogged by avoidable accidents. Though Russia has piled one technological triumph on top of another in space, its record in civil aviation has been extremely poor. Though the official enquiry is unlikely to pronounce for some time, all early indications suggest that the brakes on the Aeroflot flight malfunctioned as it landed at Irkutsk. It looks as if one set locked, causing the flight to slew violently off the runway and smash into a building. Alternatively but less likely, an engine of one side of the craft may have somehow been boosted at the very moment when the opposite power was throttling back. At least 120 passengers, many of them school kids going on holiday to a lakeside resort, perished. Astonishingly some 70 people survived the wreck, though many are seriously injured.
Such catastrophic mechanical failure is simply unacceptable in a technologically advanced society. Virtually every single system on a modern aircraft has a fail-safe back-up. Why therefore did this not work here and tragedy avoided? Air travel actually remains the safest form of any transport, per passenger mile. If airline passengers suffered the same level of carnage on roads around the world, not least here in the Kingdom, international air travel would be the exception not the rule.
Indeed it is because air travel is these days taken so much for granted that some very serious environmental, rather than safety issues have been ignored until recently. It is reckoned that the annual number of air travelers will have doubled by 2050. The problem is that aero engines working high in the earth’s atmosphere are major contributors to global warming. The impact of thousands of flights daily is compounded by the fact that aviation fuel is in most countries untaxed. While everyone readily accepts the lower cost of moving around the globe, even if this sometimes means traveling in acute discomfort, few of us has appreciated, let alone accepted the environmental price that must be paid for this increased convenience. Maybe inherent in our thinking is that if these flights are safe enough for us to go on, they are safe enough in every other respect. Unfortunately they are not.
Air passenger miles are actually unlikely to have doubled in the next 44 years. The environmental cost will have become too great. However before then technology will have given us another, more compelling and totally effective alternative. Ahead of us all lays the ability to travel and meet people via the Internet.
Video conferencing, currently a big-ticket item will become an efficient, low cost product, which will enable participants to pick up pretty well all the visual and sensory clues that go into physical meetings. Thirty years ago, global travelers were almost mystic beings. Thirty years from now, people who actually catch an airplane to a meeting, rather than video conference over the Internet, will be no less remarkable.
