Ustaz Maulana Akbarshah: Air Accident.

Air Accident.

When measured on a passenger-distance calculation, air travel is the safest form of transportation available: these figures are the ones mentioned by the air industry when quoting statistics on air safety. A typical statement is this, "UK airline operations are among the safest anywhere. When compared against all other modes of transport on a fatality per mile basis air transport is the safest — six times safer than traveling by car and twice as safe as rail." However, when measured by fatalities per person transported, buses are the safest form of transportation and the number of air travel fatalities per person are surpassed only by bicycles and motorcycles. This statistic is the one used by the insurance industry when calculating insurance rates for air travel.For every billion kilometers traveled, trains have a fatality rate 12 times larger than air travel, while automobiles have a fatality rate 62 times larger. On the other hand, for every billion journeys, buses are the safest form of transportation. By the last measure, air transportation is three times more dangerous than car transportation and almost 30 times more dangerous than bus.[1]

In modern times, two major manufacturers still produce heavy passenger aircraft for the civilian market: Boeing in the United States of America and the European company Airbus. Both have placed huge emphasis on the use of aviation safety equipment, now a billion-dollar industry in its own right, and made safety a major selling point—realizing that a poor safety record in the aviation industry is a threat to corporate survival[2] With more and more people preferring flying to traveling by trains or buses, there is no surprise that there has been a considerable increase in the number of plane crashes. They include the military as well as the civilian planes and the accidents do occur all over the six continents. As the statistic of the aircraft accident are increasing years to year, it gift many bad effect to the victim. In the event of an aircraft crash involving ground personnel, the potential for multisystem life-threatening injuries increase. In many aircraft accident fatalities, the injuries appear extensive from multiple trauma, burns or both. Explosive and blast injuries involving penetrating and blunt trauma will result from the sudden deceleration of the airframe into the ground with ignition and disbursement of aircraft flammable materials and ordnance. Explosive-related injuries will effect most organ systems and produce unique patterns of injury seldom seen outside the combat arena. The management of these injuries in the field will often be limited to triage, stabilization and transportation to an appropriate level of care.[3] Even if the aircrew successfully exits the aircraft, rescue personnel should be aware of human impact injury patterns. The aircrew often sustain thermal injuries secondary to ignition of aircraft fuel and materials, inhalation of soot and combustion products including carbon monoxide, skin and soft tissue burns, soft tissue contraction and severe burns. Hazardous materials, such as cartridge-actuated devices, tires, and oxygen bottles are major concerns. Explosive ordinance disposal personnel should target items such as hydraulic reservoirs and canopy detonation cord to secure the scene and prevent further injury.

An Air accident is the worst nightmare of every pilot or passenger that has ever ridden in an aircraft. Although air travel is one of the safest forms of transportation, accidents do happen with dramatic and terrifying results. The causes of these Air accidents vary greatly depending on specific circumstances and problems that may develop during the flight process.In many situations these incidents can be completely avoided through careful preparation and effective safety techniques. When flight crew and pilots do their jobs correctly, Air accidents are much less likely to occur.[4] Pilot Error is the identified cause of a large fraction of aircraft accidents, and the role of pilot error .Human error is tending to increase as improvements in aircraft design, weather forecasting, and other technical areas of aviation reduce the role of structure failures and other "unavoidable" causes of aviation mishaps. By the 1970s, fifty-five percent of accidents were attributed to pilot error. Clearly, the human factor, in various forms, plays an ever increasing role in air accidents. Human error may take many forms, from gross displays of bad airmanship to unconscious errors which can be attributed to fatigue or to unconscious perceptual errors. When human error is identified as the primary or contributory cause of an accident, our principal concern is not to fix blame, but to identify corrective actions which can be taken in training or procedures to reduce the likelihood of similar accidents in the future. Broadly, human-error accidents can be divided into three categories. One, reckless or careless flying, allows little scope for direct preventive action; we can tighten up on licensing practices, but some people are always going to do careless things in the air, even though they know better.[5]

Since a major fraction of all accidents are midair collisions, however, we can develop our understanding of "defensive flying" practices, by which pilots can guard themselves against collisions due. Most of the air accident case have a common threads. The threads are pilots missing a problem altogether, pilots recognizing a problem too late or pilot not understand the nature of the problem even after recognizing that there is a problem. Pilots must perceive and distinguish many layers of mental skills that go into good judgment. They need to become aware, observe, detect and understand the situation and are able to recognize between correct and incorrect alternative to a solution. Judgment is the cognitive process through which a decision is made. Therefore, a good decision is the correct solution and a must for all pilots to have the attitude. Good decision is based on knowledge, keen perception and the ability to recognize an appropriate course of action. The pilots should never assume that every positive outcome is the result of an appropriate decision. Chalk those up to luck or divine intervention. Good judgment, however, will always produce good decision. A pilot also must have a keen ability to observe his surroundings with careful attention to detail while resisting unnecessary distraction. Once a pilot is observant of his or her surrounding, the layers of perception, particularly recognition, quickly narrow to the detection and decisive understanding of a problem.[6]

There have been several cases of major air disasters in the past that have caught the eyes of many around the world. The Munich air disaster occurred on 6 February 1958, when British European Airways Flight 609 crashed on its third attempt to take off from a slush-covered runway at Munich-Riem Airport in Munich, West Germany. On board the plane was the Manchester United football team, nicknamed the "Busby Babes", along with a number of supporters and journalists.^[1] Twenty of the 44 people on board the aircraft died in the crash. The injured, some of whom had been knocked unconscious, were taken to the Rechts der Isar Hospital in Munich where three more died, resulting in a total of 23 fatalities with 21 survivors. An investigation by the West German airport authorities originally blamed Captain Thain for the crash, claiming that he had failed to de-ice the wings of the aircraft, despite statements to the contrary from eyewitnesses. It was later established that the crash had, in fact, been caused by the build-up of slush on the runway, which had resulted in the aircraft being unable to achieve take-off velocity; Thain's name was eventually cleared in 1968, ten years after the incident.[7] The second case of air accident is Air France Flight 447. Air France Flight 447 was a scheduled commercial flight from Galeão International Airport in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil to Charles de Gaulle International Airport in Paris, France. On 1 June 2009, the Airbus A330-200 airliner serving the flight crashed into the Atlantic Ocean, killing all 216 passengers and 12 aircrew. The accident was the deadliest in the history of Air France and has been described as the worst accident in French aviation history. It was the second fatal accident involving an Airbus A330, the first while in commercial passenger service, and, to date, has the highest death toll of any aviation accident involving the aircraft type anywhere in the world.

The investigation into the accident, which continued for three years after the disaster, was initially hampered by the lack of eyewitness evidence and radar tracks, as well as by difficulty in finding the aircraft's black boxes, which were finally located and recovered from the ocean floor in May 2011, nearly two years after the accident. The final report was released at a news conference on 5 July 2012. It states that the accident resulted from a succession of events temporary inconsistency between the airspeed measurements, likely following the obstruction of the pilot tubes by ice crystals that caused the autopilot to disconnect, inappropriate control inputs that destabilized the flight path and led to a stall and pilot misunderstanding of the situation leading to a lack of control inputs that would have made it possible to recover from it. [8] Another case is JAL Flight 123. The crash of Japan Airlines Flight 123 in 1985 is the single-aircraft disaster with the highest number of fatalities. In this crash, 520 died on board a Boeing 747. The aircraft suffered an explosive decompression from an incorrectly repaired aft pressure bulkhead, which failed in mid flight and destroyed most of its vertical stabilizer, and severed all of the hydraulic lines, making the 747 virtually uncontrollable. The pilots were able to keep the plane flying for several minutes before crashing into a mountain. Remarkably, several people survived the impact, but by the time the rescue teams got to the crash site, the majority had succumbed to their injuries.

One of the international scholars which is James Fallows has his own perspective on the air accident. He think that the crew need to be fundamentally oriented in understanding what was happening to their airplane, and in having a clear line-of-command about who was in charge of the airplane. Besides, clarity about who is in command of an aircraft is important in ways that "You've got the controls" / "Yes, I've got the controls" which is a basic element of "cockpit resource management" for flight crews. For whatever reason, that and other aspects of basic airmanship got neglected in the panic and confusion that followed the loss of many crucial cockpit instruments. Another international scholars is Judith Arasanu. His perspective is that every pilot must have good judgment so that they can make good decision making. Some pilots experience momentary lapses in these skills, brought on by isolated cases of fatigue or stress. Other exhibit a more pervasive and consistent lack of judgment skills caused by disruptive or submassive personality traits.[9] One of the Islamic scholars is Sheikh Muhammed Al-Munajjid. He talks about the importance of insurance and criticize the system of conventional insurance as exploitative and unjust. He point out that paying money for something, with no guarantee of benefit, involves high ambiguity and risk. One pays into the program, but may or may not need to receive compensation from the program, which could be considered a form of gambling. For those living in non-Islamic countries, who are mandated to abide by insurance law, there is no sin in complying with the local law

Another Islamic scholars is Sheikh Fahd Bin Saad Al Jahni, a professor of Sharia graduate studies. He said that the air accident just like what had happened at 11 September 2001 in United States of America can be count as electronic jihad. Al Jahni added that “any attempt to spite the enemy and empower the religion must be conducted by legitimate means and according to Muslim rules. Therefore, religion could be widely empowered through electronic websites. This is what some people call “the electronic Jihad”. Thus, the terminology is correct, but it is the definition that matters as well as the extent to which the concept respects the legitimate procedure.” In my perspective, Airplanes have become more complicated and sophisticated in their evolution within the past 50 years. Maintenance technicians must continuously update their proficiency and knowledge in airplane repair because of the enormous differences in new and old aircraft that are presently in use could reduce the probability for the accident to occur. In addition, maintenance professionals will always try to avoid making errors. Unfortunately, even the most highly trained and motivated professionals will make mistakes, however, with suitable understanding of the human factor and appropriate training, professionals can mitigate the consequences of errors.

In conclusion, safety and security are of primary concern for any transport system. For air accident, we must always think positively that nothing bad may occur as we are thousand feet above the sky. One of the viewpoint in considering future measure for air traffic safety is by looking at the air traffic conditions, the problems of congestion and delay due to the heavy inbound traffic of aircrafts in airports and in the air have become serious. While air traffic volume is expected to increase further in the future, it is an urgent issue to establish a safer and more efficient air traffic system in the air. [10] An Air accident is the worst nightmare of every pilot or passenger that has ever ridden in an aircraft. Although air travel is one of the safest forms of transportation, accidents do happen with dramatic and terrifying results. Hence, always pray that we are not involve in this kind of accident.[11]

[1] Sebastien Freissinet. "The Tenerife crash-March 27th, 1977"