Feel uneasy about flying? Air safety expert says he'd get on a plane today
Recent crashes, including Delta jet that flipped in Toronto, spark passenger fears
A string of plane crashes has left some air passengers uneasy about boarding their next plane. But aviation expert Scott Hamilton says that air travel today is safer than its ever been, due to the "experience and lessons learned from decades of accidents."
A Delta Air Lines flight crashed and flipped over on landing at Toronto's Pearson airport this week, with all 76 passengers and four crew members managing to escape alive. The incident follows the deaths of 67 people in a collision between an American Airlines flight and military helicopters in Washington, D.C. in January. Seventeen people in total also died when an air ambulance crashed in Philadelphia, and a commuter plane crash in Alaska.
Hamilton, an aviation consultant with decades of experience, spoke to The Current's Matt Galloway about the crash in Toronto and what nervous fliers should consider. Here is part of their conversation.
It seems astonishing that this happens and everybody survives and that most of these people who are hospitalized have now been released. What does that tell you?
It really speaks to not only the safety that's been built into airplanes, but in this particular case, a lot of luck. If you watched this one video that came out yesterday — that was taken from a cockpit of a plane waiting to take off on that same runway, you saw that when the wing separated from the airplane, a fireball took place. Well, the plane continued to kind of roll out of the fireball. And that's really what saved the lives of all these people, along with the safety that's been built into the airplane.
Is that engineering or is that luck?
It's experience and lessons learned from decades of accidents. It's already been pointed out in many media that the seats in these airplanes now have to withstand what's called 16-g, or stresses 16 times the size of gravity. And all these seats, as far as we know, remained attached to their floor mountings, even inverted — as opposed to seats detaching from the floor mountings and becoming missiles with passengers strapped into them.
What else has gone on when it comes to engineering that's made planes safer?
In this case, again, we're fortunate that the fuselage of the cabin didn't catch fire. But again, from lessons learned all over these decades, the materials used in cabins now are designed to inhibit or retard fire. Back in the early part of the jet age in the 1960s, there were toxic materials used in the fuselages, there were very inflammable materials used in fuselages. Here we had a fire that was around the airplane. The cabin did not catch fire. You didn't have any toxic fumes other than that from the spilled jet fuel and the fire retardant. And that's part of what's made this accident 100 per cent survivable.
This is the fourth major air crash in North America in under a month, including, of course, the fatal crash in Washington, D.C. last month. 67 people onboard a passenger plane and a military helicopter died, after the two collided in midair. You would see these incidents, and if you are a nervous flyer, you would be even more nervous. If you are somebody who is confident, you still might be a little unnerved by what's going on. And you could imagine the people would ask whether it's safe to fly. What would you say to those people?
You know, this is an unfortunate coincidence in timing.
In Canada, the last airline accident before this one was in … 2011. That was that First Air charter flight up in Resolute, and it killed 12 of the 15 people on board. But there was survivability in that. And before that, the last major airline accident in Canada was 1993. So this is unfortunate in terms that they had this group of accidents. But the safety that we see here from the statistics is just astounding.
The cliche is that you're more likely to, you know, be injured or killed in a car crash on the way to the airport — or falling down the stairs as you leave your house heading to the airport — than you would be flying on a plane?
In 2022, in Canada, there were 1,900 auto deaths, and in 2022, there were 42,500 auto deaths in the United States. That's the size of [the population of] West Vancouver today.
One of the things that came out of this … is that the crew on board this jet did an incredible job of getting people out.… What sort of training do they go through to handle something like this?
When they're first hired at an airline, they go through extensive training and they go through recurrent training every year as well.
It's not just ground-based accidents. They do water training in case the airplane comes down in water — that's very rare, but they do water training and they get this recurrent training every single year.
What I'd heard is that they have something like 90 seconds to get people out. Is that right?
Yes, 90 seconds is correct.
The Canadian Transportation Safety Board is investigating.… What are the questions that you would want answered about what happened here?
It's a matter of routine that the investigators will take a look at the weather conditions.… They'll take a look at the pilot proficiency, the pilot rest period before the accident, the pilot's training history. They'll take a look at the cabin crew's training history. Again, that's routine. They'll take a look at the maintenance history of the aircraft. They'll take a look at the field conditions and the runway conditions. And that's just a partial list.
But having seen those videos and talking as you have about the improvements in safety, you would have no concerns about getting on a plane today?
I would do that tomorrow, today — sure.
Audio produced by Ines Colabrese. Q&A has been edited for length and clarity
