What the hell is occurring up there within the sky?

The incidents really feel like they began in January, when a door plug blew out of a midair Boeing 737 MAX 9 plane operated by Alaska Airlines. Ensuing investigations have led to a series of revelations a couple of faltering safety culture at Boeing and its contractors. Then the creepy headlines saved coming. Just this month, a wheel fell off a United Airlines jetliner because it took off from San Francisco; flames shot out of an United flight’s engine because it left Houston, Texas; one other United flight ran off the runway in Houston because it got here in to land; and a Boeing 787 Dreamliner operated by the Chilean airline Latam and certain for Auckland, New Zealand, suddenly lost altitude whereas midair, injuring dozens of passengers.

The incidents are unsettling. “The public has every right to be alarmed,” says Daniel Kwasi Adjekum, a former Ghana Air Force squadron commander who later flew Boeing 737 plane and now teaches aviation security as a professor on the University of North Dakota.

But knowledge, stringently collected by the US Federal Aviation Administration and different world regulators, means that business flight is basically very protected—and has even gotten safer over simply the previous twenty years. “Statistics don’t show any significant abnormality,” Adjekum says. “Millions of flights are operated by airlines all over the world every day, and passengers get from A to B safely.”

The incidents may simply really feel as in the event that they’re coming quick as a result of the media has been primed to report on the kind of scary however non-fatal screw-ups that occur when people are working any sort of system—and significantly these involving Boeing plane. But redundancy is at all times constructed into aviation techniques, in order that, say, dropping one wheel doesn’t result in a horrific crash.

But that sort of public consideration can really be useful to the aviation business, Adjekum says: “When the media throws a spotlight, it forces all of us within the aviation industry to be extra cautious,” he says. “We go back to the drawing table, and we use the data collected to improve safety.”

The US hasn’t seen a deadly business plane incident since 2018, when one passenger died onboard a Southwest Airlines flight after part of an engine broke off and shattered a cabin window. Before that, nobody had died onboard a US flight since 2009.