Aviation must double down on its safety culture

Messages pay tribute to the 179 victims of the Jeju Air jet that crashed while landing on December 29 at Muan International Airport in South Korea. EPA

January 5 last year was a day that the 177 passengers and crew of Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 will never forget. Six minutes after taking off from Portland, Oregon, a door panel on the Boeing 737 Max 9 jet blew out. As some of the terrified passengers used their smartphones to film the suddenly depressurised inside of the juddering aircraft, tragedy was narrowly avoided as the pilots made a successful emergency landing.

Despite modern aviation being the indisputably safest form of transport, the incident highlighted the brittle nature of passengers’ and investors’ confidence in the industry. Before the day was over, Boeing shares were down more than 8 per cent and US federal officials had ordered the immediate grounding of many Boeing 737 Max 9 planes.

However, worse for the beleaguered manufacturer was to come. Last month, a Jeju Air Boeing 737-800 crash landed at Muan International Airport in South Korea, killing 179 people on board. What caused the crash is still being investigated but two other incidents in December have put aviation as a whole in the spotlight.

On Christmas Day, 38 people died when an Azerbaijan Airlines Embraer 190AR crashed in Kazakhstan and three days later passengers on an Air Canada Express flight recorded sparks and flames coming out the aircraft’s left-hand side as it slid down the runway at a Nova Scotia airport following an apparent landing-gear failure. Although Russian President Vladimir Putin has since apologised to Baku over the crash of Azerbaijan Airlines Flight 8243, which followed what investigators believe was an “external impact”, overall it has been a sobering year for aviation and its safety, manufacturing and regulatory processes are all under scrutiny.

The industry is responding; on Friday, Boeing said it is making progress in rebuilding trust with passengers and regulators, having introduced more than a dozen new quality control checks. Expert investigators are meticulously examining the incidents in South Korea, Kazakhstan and Canada as they look for answers that will inform better safety practices in the future.

However, so many incidents in such a short space of time should spur aviation to double down on its safety culture in a proactive way. Instead of letting its enviable safety record lead to complacency or unquestioned assumptions – for example that incorporating more and more advanced technology into flight processes is always the right choice – regulators and manufacturers must move swiftly, and together, to shore up confidence in the industry.

This is especially true as new risks to flight safety emerge. In September, the results of a six-week workshop with more than 950 participants was published by OpsGroup, an aviation advocacy body. It said that last year there was a 500 per cent increase in GPS spoofing, a form of cyberattack when counterfeit radio signals are used to override location information. This can confuse pilots and send planes off track. In this region, the dangers are clear – in March, The National reported from Beirut on how jamming and spoofing of signals blamed on Israel was forcing civilian airliners to use alternatives to GPS, with one Turkish Airlines flight running into difficulties as it began its descent into Lebanon’s capital because it was still using GPS navigation.

The industry also faces new challenges in the form of damaging online misinformation. On Saturday, Emirates airline was critical of social media platforms for not taking down “false and alarming information” quickly enough after a hoax video claimed to show an Emirates plane crash that never occurred. In India, analysts have warned that a series of hoax bomb threats that hit many airlines there in October leading to flight detours and schedule disruptions, could have long-term consequences for airlines.

Aviation is not just about passenger flights; cargo flights are vital to the world economy and millions of people rely on aid that is flown in. Aviation’s indispensability makes it all the more important that everyone who steps on a modern jet airliner – pilots, cabin crew and passengers – are confident of reaching their destination safely.