SEA-TAC INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT - Passengers seem to take flying in stride, despite a rash of aviation disasters in recent months culminating Thursday with the crash of an Air Algerie MD-83 over Mali with the presumed loss of 116 passengers.
The crash might be weather related as storms were reported in the area.
Just a week ago a Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, a Boeing 777, was shot down over rebel-controlled eastern Ukraine by a Russian built SA-11 Buk missile along with 298 lives, according to U.S. government officials. Another Malaysia 777, Flight 370, which vanished after leaving Kuala Lumpur for Beijing, has still not yet been found. It s believe the plane reversed course and headed to the southern Indian Ocean before going down.
On Wednesday, a turbo-prop passenger plane crashed in Taiwan in bad weather.
But despite a confluence of catastrophe, the incidents appear to lack a common cause, although two of the cases do involve the same type of plane from the same airline: Malaysia.
There are 93,000 flights a day over the Earth, said John Nance, an air safety analyst and former airline pilot. There has never been a time in history, in the history of commercial aviation that we have been as safe.
Nance reflected on how back in the 1980s and early 1990s, it was not unusual to have a major air disaster in the United States just about every year. Between the Colgan air crash in 2009 that killed 49 aboard, a Q-400 on final approach to Buffalo, New York, and the crash of an Asiana 777 short of the runway at San Francisco International Airport in 2013 that killed three, the United States has seen one of its safest periods with no major passenger airliners lost in four years. Although several U.S. based cargo carriers have lost planes in that period, most overseas.
I think we have a lot of safety measures in place. I m not more concerned than I was before, said passenger Shannon Hale before boarding her cross country flight from Sea-Tac Airport to North Carolina.
