Anyone who has ever flown an aircraft will, when they see one taking off, stop what they’re doing — even in the middle of a heated conversation — and watch it take to the sky. It’s just what pilots do.
For take-off, along with landing, is the most critical part of flight. It’s also the one that sets flying apart from anything else in the ground-bound misery of human existence — the moment when we defy gravity and slip off the face of the Earth.
That’s one reason it hurts so much to watch the amateur video of Air India Flight 171 struggling to fly. Seeing that Boeing 787, heavy with fuel and people, nose-high and mushing in as it claws for altitude, is the stuff of every pilot’s bad dreams and night sweats.
The laws of aviation safety are written in blood. While it’s cold comfort to the families of the dead to say that getting on a commercial airliner is one of the safest things you can do, it is — statistically — true, largely because the industry is good at learning from its mistakes.
Aviation safety expert JM Ramsden once pointed out that airliners are designed to requirements that state “the probability of catastrophe arising from a single technical failure shall be no higher than one in 1,000-million”. (He adds this is an entirely theoretical safety level, of course, because it could never be demonstrated by testing.)
Speculation over the latest crash is running amok. Bird strike? Engine failure? Pilot error? Software problem? An issue with the flaps or undercarriage? Contaminated fuel? And how about the lucky passenger sitting in 11A, who escaped unscathed?
All eyes will now be on Boeing and Air India as investigators determine why AI171 failed to fly more than a few kilometres from the end of the runway.
Meanwhile, expect crazy people to insist that seat 11A is some sort of talisman with magic powers.
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