Accidents

News Dated 28 May 2011 (Indian Express)

MUMBAI: A Spicejet Mumbai-Hyderabad flight made an emergency landing at Mumbai airport early on Friday morning after smoke was detected in the cargo hold. The aircraft took off at 5.30 am. The pilot sent distress calls to the ATC soon after he found the cargo fire alarm had gone off. The aircraft made an emergency landing at 6.05 am at the airport.

News Dated 25 May 2011
(http://news.webindia123.com/news/articles/India/20110119/1670479.html)
A Kingfisher flight, which took off from here for Bhubaneswar, returned to Mumbai soon afterwards Wednesday and made a precautionary landing due to a technical problem, an airline official said, adding that all passengers were safe. "Shortly after Kingfisher Airlines flight IT 3141 took off for Bhubaneswar, the commander received a cautionary alert from one of the on-board systems," a spokesperson said. The emergency was withdrawn 45 minutes later after the aircraft landed safely in Mumbai.

The above mentioned news is just a reference, but not very uncommon now a days. Be it the flight of Jet Airways, Spicejet, Air India or any other airline, the news of flights escaping the accidents, like fire seen in cargo or in engine or the flight skidding on the runway, is becoming more & more frequent now-a-days. The question is weather it is really a matter of chance that could not have been avoided. In case any mishap occurs, we usually escape on the excuse that we had taken all precautions, but some technical fault occurred which could always occur in terms of probability. Can this excuse bring the life of the victims back? No, but those lives could be saved of course if we do our work a bit more sincerely and CAREFULLY. 

First I would be taking above mentioned instance (of SpiceJet) here. The profit before tax of said airlines (Spice Jet in last financial year (FY 2010-11) was about 126 crore INR, which is hardly 4.3% of it corresponding income. If a company finds it difficult to operate at such low margins, they should better look at ways to improve the profit or better close the company. After all not all the companies can be forced to run even after making huge losses as is AIR INDIA (at present). But the cost cutting or increase in profit margin shall not be at the cost of others, or shall it be? 

Coming back to the probability of accidents, its a widely accepted saying that "Machines do not make mistakes, Human does" The error can be anywhere - in design or in operation & maintenance but the error is because of human fault. Agreed that human error can't be eliminated but it can always be minimized. If we compare the frequency of such incidents with that in developed nations, we can easily see that there is still a lot of scope for improvement. It would be better if we adopt a preventive approach in our work & life rather than going for damage control every time such avoidable accidents happen.