A major plane accident occurred in Nepal on Wednesday. The aircraft, a Bombardier CRJ-200 belonging to Saurya Airlines, carried 19 passengers, 18 of whom died. Only the pilot survived.
This incident happened at Kathmandu's Tribhuvan Airport. According to the Civil Aviation Authority, the plane was heading to Pokhara International Airport but crashed on the runway just minutes after takeoff, turning right instead of left. Video footage showed the aircraft completely engulfed in flames.
This is the biggest airline accident of the year so far. Earlier in March, a Russian Air Force plane crashed, killing 15 people.
Air travel in Nepal is considered very unsafe due to the mountainous terrain and rapidly changing weather. Last January, a flight belonging to Yeti Airlines crashed, resulting in the death of 72 passengers. Over 350 people have died in plane crashes in Nepal over the past 24 years.
Source: aajtak
According to Aviation Safety, an organization that tracks plane accidents, there were 813 plane crashes globally between 2017 and 2023, resulting in 1,473 passenger deaths.
Most plane crashes occur during landing. Over the last seven years, there have been 261 landing-related accidents, followed by 212 accidents during takeoff.
India had 14 plane crashes within this period. However, only one accident resulted in passenger deaths. In August 2020, an Air India Express Boeing 737-800 slipped on the runway during landing at Kozhikode Airport in Kerala, killing 21 of its 190 passengers.
This crash was catastrophic, breaking the plane into multiple pieces. A year-long investigation attributed the accident to pilot error. The 257-page report concluded that the pilot ignored established Standard Operating Procedures.
Source: aajtak
Why is air travel considered the safest?
Despite an average of 200 plane crashes annually over the past seven years, air travel is still considered the safest mode of transportation.
According to Professor Anthony Brickhouse of Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Florida, air travel remains the safest mode of transportation. He told CNN that flying 38,000 feet in the air is safer than driving on the ground.
The International Air Transport Association (IATA) reported that over 37 million flights took off globally in 2023, a 17% increase from 2022. Despite this, there was only one major accident resulting in fatalities. The same year, a plane crash in Nepal killed 72 people.
The report claimed that on average, one accident occurs per 1.26 million flight takeoffs. In contrast, there was one accident per 1.3 million flights in 2022. Over the last five years, the average is one accident per 880,000 flights.
IATA claims that if a person travels by air every day for 103,239 years, only then would they be likely to experience an accident one day.
Professor Arnold Barnett of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology conducted a study on aviation safety. His report states that between 2018 and 2022, the probability of a fatal air travel accident was one in 13.4 million passenger journeys. In simple terms, the risk of dying in a plane crash is very low.
How safe is air travel in India?
Statistics show that air travel in India is also safe. Over the past five years, there has been only one plane crash resulting in passenger deaths.
The Ministry of Road Transport's data reveals that over 150,000 road accidents occurred nationwide in 2022, killing over 61,000 people. On average, 167 people die in road accidents in India every day.
Similarly, rail accidents continue to occur. In 2022-23, there were 48 rail accidents, killing nine people. However, these figures do not include the catastrophic rail accident in Balasore, Odisha, in June 2022, which killed over 300 passengers. Recently, the Kanchanjunga Express in West Bengal and the Chandigarh-Dibrugarh Express in Uttar Pradesh's Gonda district also met with accidents. These accidents resulted in 10 and 4 deaths, respectively.
