Air Accidents and Investigations

Over the past few years air accidents doesn't take any attention. But if an aircraft is saved from an accident then it is off course a Big Issue. There has been a lot of incidents were ignorance from pilots or ground staff has led to a lot of accidents. If the mistake is committed by the pilot then there is nobody could be blamed. Air Accidents has very long history and with each and every accident, a new lesson is learnt. Recently u will know how an aircraft landed safely even after the formation of a 1 meter hole. It may be as small as sliding down the runway to parts breaking down in the midflight. But both might result in huge loss of life.

Plane crashes with large numbers of casualties set in with the early passenger flights of the 1920s. The yearly death toll of plane crashes exceeded 100 for the first time in 1928, and 1,000 for the first time in 1943. Since 1945, the number of deaths has remained below 1,000 only twice, in 2004 and 2007.
Wikipedia

The investigation of each Air crash is one of the most difficult tasks as they have to first gather all the parts from the debris. And most often the Aircraft is rebuilt from the debris. At times this rebuilding work could take a year also. The first most important device the investigators look at is the Black box and the Flight Data/voice Recorder. At times it becomes the most tedious job to find this black box. For example, a few years back, an aircraft crashed into the Marsh lands. Witness said that they heard huge sound but couldn’t find anything on the ground. They found the Black Box after a few weeks or months of searching. The same thing happens for Space shuttle crashes. For example, the search for the data recorder in Columbia space shuttle was one of the toughest task as there was a possibility that it could have been fallen anywhere across a certain area of the path of travel across the entire US. Of course they did find the Recorder intact. It did survive the crash.

Then, there is the tedious job of recovering the data from the black box. Sometime the data could get damaged if it is exposed to a prolonged period in water. And even after recovering data from black box, at times could provide no actual cause of the crash for the investigators.

For air crash investigations, it requires the skill from almost all fields. And off course the cause is often identified but that might take even a few years.

An Air crash cannot be prevented. At times, they’re just disaster waiting to happen. At times it might be natural causes like slippery runway or poor visibility or it might be human error like improper maintenance, careless or ignorance from the part of pilots and the pressure from the management could also lead to air crash.

Hope we would reach a day were we can say that this aircraft will not crash at all