Although the risk of dying in an air accident is very small (there is a much greater chance of being killed in a road accident), the public reaction to such events is intense. Loss of confidence in an airline, or in flying generally, is common, whether the accident was fatal or not. Crashes have other serious consequences. The cost of rescue operations, recovering bodies, retrieving aircraft wreckage and investigation can run into millions of Naira.
There are many explanations for an airplane crash. An air accident is rarely caused by just one event. Usually there are several factors, connected like links in a chain. Often the final link – the pilot’s response to an emergency – is seen as the sole cause of the accident, but investigation usually reveals other causes.
Human error
Human error is the underlying cause in the majority of aircraft accidents. The person at fault may be a pilot, maintenance engineer, ground crew member, manager or supervisor, designer, or someone involved in the manufacture of an aircraft. Errors on the ground can include faulty aircraft construction or maintenance, incorrect instructions to air crew, mistakes in refuelling or securing the aircraft doors, overloading, and excessive stress on staff. In the air, pilots may make navigation errors, or choose to fly in cloudy conditions using visual cues such as landmarks instead of navigational instruments.
The general categories for airplane crashes include:
Weather – Poor visibility. Icing conditions. Some pilots are not trained or equipped to fly at night and find themselves having to continue flying to reach an airport after it gets dark.
Mechanical – This can be a failure of a part during normal service. Most aircraft systems have built-in redundancy so that a failure of one part will not create an unsafe condition. Some mechanical failures is due to bad maintenance; such as someone forgetting to tighten a bolt.
Pilot Error – this can vary from not paying attention to his instruments or watching for other a/c. People are only human so many accidents are attributed to poor judgement of the pilot. For example; the weather may be getting bad but the pilot chooses to fly into the storm. Larger passenger airliners have 2 or more flight crew which helps eliminate some human errors.
Air Traffic Controller – Sometimes the traffic controller gives the “Clear to Takeoff” or similar instructions that result in an accident.
A new one is called:
Cockpit Management – Airlines now stress that the Pilot In Command should keep control of the situation and accept inputs from his crew without judging them. If the Pilot In Command begins to ignore or judge the recommendations of the crew, the crew will not function as a team and someone will over-look something that will lead to an accident.
Fuel Starvation – This is really a subset of Pilot Error but it can be the result of several factors.
For more, visit http://natgeotv.com/uk/why-planes-crash
