Airline travel is booming. Whatever is said about reducing carbon footprints, however unpleasant the ride and however much we complain about being treated like cattle, while being stiffed at every turn, the more we do it. And it’s going to get worse. Not only that, it’s going to get more dangerous too.
Despite record fuel costs Asian and European airlines are on a roll. At last November’s Dubai airshow Emirates Airline ordered 81 airbuses, eleven of them the new double deck A380 plus a dozen Boeings at some US$23 billion.
And yes, we’ve seen those artist renderings where we drop by our choice of bars, having just enjoyed a workout in the gym, by way of the inflight casino and boutique, before returning to our fully reclining bedseat to enjoy a slap-up dinner and settling down to our choice of 100 movies before wafting off into dreamland.
Who do they think they’re fooling?
A fraction of the above, if any, will be available for a king’s ransom to 1% of the travelling public, the remaining 750 of us on an A380 will be laid out like cargo on a slaveship. And by the end, of it a significant percentage of us will have picked up a nasty bug because the airlines are too mean to recycle the air with enough oxygen, while an unlucky few may die from thrombotic embolism.
In the US, air travel may be safe, but it is in dire straits. The Bush administration has declared open season on the American travelling public and every jumped-up disaffected psychotic petty Hitler, whether cabin or ground staff, security goons or check-in monsters they can each have you manacled and thrown in the brig if you even look at them wrong. And they wonder why sometimes we snap and give way to air rage? US airlines have been grossly mismanaged and over-regulated to the extent that they are flying old and unsuitable aircraft with under trained and insufficient staff.
The situation in airports has become unbearable. To add insult to injury US airlines will be charging for that second check-in item, just like their grasping Asian and European counterparts. Cathay Pacific declares record profits, despite oil at $100 a barrel, so what does it do? Increases prices and cuts down on the already “iffy” benefits in their loyalty programme. Loyalty is a 2-way process, guys!
Are things going to get better anytime soon? Don’t bet on it. In fact safety is likely to become an increasing source of real concern. It already is of course, here in Indonesia. There are not going to be enough pilots to go around and what there are will have a lot less training on the job than they used to. Geneva-based International Air Transport Association (IATA) announced recently that the industry would need another 17,000 new pilots annually over the next 20 years to meet demand. While it takes the airline manufacturers just a matter of months to churn out new Airbuses and Boeings, it takes years to train the pilots to fly them. So the successful airlines steal from their less successful competitors.
New pilots now pull $15,000 a month, and that’s before a whole slew of perks and benefits. In the old days rookies learned their way up the ladder, starting as flight engineers watching how it was done. It was years before they got near the co-pilots seat even. And, aircraft were a lot less complicated then. Today pilots need as little as 250 hours of flight time to land a job as co-pilot on our latest passenger jets.
How much of that is on a flight simulator one wonders?
In Hong kong Dragon Air has had to reduce scheduled flights because of an exodus of pilots. That’s something that makes my blood run cold. This was never a great airline in my book. It’s not just that I’ve been left high and dry by them in the middle of China, it’s their pilots that really frighten me. I knew one of their most senior pilots quite well and all his friends and acquaintances knew him as a drunk. A very disciplined drunk, but an alcoholic nonetheless. Last I knew he never drank 24 hours before a flight, other than that he was up for it. Anyone over 40 knows, 24 hours don’t do it quite like it used to.
So where does that leave us lot stuck in our island paradise? Especially those of us who are forced to make the odd trip up to Jakarta and back (a trip with a 20% chance of turning into an 16-hour overnight marathon). Not in a very good place.
Since the year 2000 the yearly passenger count in Indonesia has tripled to 30 million and the number of airlines has grown from 5 to 25. By 2010 the government expects the number of trips could double again. Already the country has experienced more than its fair share of fatal accidents. The EU and the US aviation advisory bodies have warned us not to fly on Indonesian airlines because of safety issues. They’ve banned their flying to Europe, Australia and the US.
Mid-2007 Indonesian aviation authorities revoked the licenses for four national carriers and suspended five more, because they did not meet basic safety requirements. Alarmingly, within 3 months the two commercial airlines responsible for the country’s most recent air disasters with a loss of over over 120 lives, Garuda and Adam Air were back in business with their safety ratings upgraded.
Here’s what Budhi Mullawan Suyitno, Director General for aviation of the nation’s Transport Department , has to say, “The main problem..... is the lack of human resources. We have a scarcity of of pilots and technicians.... it’s difficult to retain key personnel”. Aviation Today , a leading industry source comments, “despite the fact that Indonesia’s major accidents are pilot error-related.... Australia, EU and US have been asked to lift travel advisories on its airlines”. Aviation Today goes on to quote the reaction from the head of Indonesia’s Pilot Association who is reported to have said, “ it isn’t fair to target pilots” for pilot error....”.
Well er... yes and no. Pilots can and do cause crashes. But we know too pilots have been ordered by management to fly planes which are unsafe, and a brave few have been known to refuse. Then again, government turns a blind eye. Setio Rahardjo, chairman of the National Transportation Safety Committee, said, “We know some of airlines do not have a proper maintenance system.”
So if it it hard to obtain and retain good pilots and technicians and the number of people wanting to fly is going explode, what is the future for Indonesian aviation and all the other countries with airlines that are short of experienced pilots, short of trained technicians and, shall we say, laxly regulated?
We used to draw comfort from being told that flying was a lot safer than driving or crossing the road. Well, extrapolated against a world population of somewhere between 7 or 8 billion people, or even the worldwide total of airline passengers, the odds of being killed were so infinitesimal that we could reasonably dismiss them. Let’s reassess this in terms of flying in Indonesia. If the figure of 30 million passengers a year is correct for 2007 and 124 people died from air crashes in that year your chances of not making it are just a little under one in a quarter of a million passengers.
If you think that sounds OK, in terms of the US, where there were no airline fatalities in 2007, that would mean over 3,000 Americans killed instead of none. In other words, despite the foulness of the experience it is safe to say you are 3,000 times more likely to die in an aircrash in Indonesia than in the US.
