An MIT study says that approximately eighty percent of accidents in aviation are a result of human error. A full twenty percent (one in five) is still too large for other errors and more on that later, but genuine human error, the sort that leads to road accidents by experienced drivers, plays a big role.
The remaining errors, tied to this first sort (one doesn’t know where one ends and the other starts) can be really bad weather, faulty calibration avionics with air traffic controllers or other aircrafts and plain bad regulation.
The Air Blue crash of two years ago, the Bhoja air crash from a couple of days ago and the near miss in Karachi by Shaheen Airways would imply that, given a Poisson distribution of human error, something also might be lacking on the regulatory front.
Regulation, not only in terms of what safety precautions have taken place but also what protocols are to be adopted in case of difficult conditions and also how to respond once the accidents have taken place.
Accidents happen all over the world. Nowhere should this be interpreted as an argument for complacency. There should be a thorough investigation into the causes of the accident and if indeed it was a most human error, perhaps certain stimuli of pilots’ behaviour could be looked into.
The broadcast media’s behaviour, as far as coverage of the event goes, has been far from ideal. There were ill-informed assertions about what could have happened and assigning blame where there shouldn’t have been. A culture bred on Indian revenge-drama movies tends to seek out the moustache twirling villain and the vultures found in the airline’s eponymous owner (who claims to own just a five percent share) the perfect candidate. Perhaps if the pitchforks could be kept aside before a clearer picture comes through?
As a last note: though there should be increased, more vigilant regulation of our airspaces and the commercial aircraft that ply them, there should also be increased regulation of our media houses in how to interact with the bereaved. Shameful attempts at cornering the tear-jerk market.
