Understanding Air Safety in the Jet Age

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Understanding Air Safety in the Jet Age

Civilian airliners rarely crash, but when they do it is big news and leads to serious questions about the safety of flying. Is flying really the safest form of travel? It depends how "safety" is measured. To understand the risk, and make decisions, it's helpful to understand how incidents and accidents occur, and the factors that add to your chances of avoiding or surviving an incident.

This book examines the history of civilian air safety since the beginning of the jet age. The first commercial civilian jet airliner was the de Haviland Comet. It first flew in prototype form in 1949 with the first production aircraft flying on 9 January 1951. The first flight with paying passengers, Comet registration G-ALYS, took off on 2 May 1952. The first accident happened less than a year later on 3 March 1953. A Comet 1A, registration CF-CUN, failed to take off on a delivery flight and crashed killing all 11 people on board. It was the beginning of a grim toll of incidents and accidents that continues to this day. However, all is not "doom and gloom". By making sensible choices, you affect the odds of being involved in an incident, and your chances of surviving it. Also, knowing what to expect in an accident and planning what to do if it happens will help.

Part 1: Introduction

• How Safe is Flying?
• The Dawn of the Jet Age

Part 2: Mechanical Failure

• Metal Fatigue

• Terror at 22,000 ft - United Airlines Flight 811
• Impossible Landing - United Airlines Flight 232

• Structural Failure
• Fire

• Fire Down Below - ValuJet Flight 592

• Getting the Basics Right

• Hanging on by the Fingertips - British Airways Flight 5390

Part 3: Design Failure

• Falling from the Sky - The DC10 Panic

• Disaster Foreshadowed - American Airlines Flight 96
• Explosive Decompression - Turkish Airlines Flight 981
• The Final Straw - American Airlines Flight 191

• Falling from the Sky Again - The 737 Max Panic
• Bad Design, Bad Maintenance - TWA 800

Part 4: Human Factors

• Pull Up! Pull Up!
• Terrorism and Pilot Suicide

• Mass Murder by Pilot - Germanwings Flight 9525

• Taking Shortcuts

• Air Florida Flight 90

Part 5: Acts of God?

• Wildlife Encounters

• Bird Strikes

• A Dip in the Hudson - Cactus 1549

• Ice and Rain

Part 6: Surviving Disaster

• Common Themes
• Being a Survivor

Information for Contributors

• Style Guide and Authors

This book is dual licensed under the GFDL and Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.