Tourists die in Nepal air crash

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Title – Tourists die in Nepal air crashSource – www.bbc.co.uk
Date – 8th October 2008

We do tend to take flying for granted and yet especially in more remote parts of the world it is only the skill of the pilots which keeps us safe.

Sit at dinner with a group of friends and ask them about flying and it seems everyone has a story, from terrible turbulence to full-scale emergency landing, terrible food to faulty seats and we laugh and joke about the need for life jackets or how much the ‘brace’ position is really going to help us in an emergency. Airline reputations are easily lost and in the era of 24-hour news and the internet every bad experience seems to find it’s way to a ‘forum’ and good experiences tend to go unnoticed.

I have flown into very many different aircraft, undoubtedly flying business class on Singapore Airlines, which regularly wins or comes close to the top of the Airline Awards league table is a pleasure and I felt very safe indeed; the same can not be said for the propeller plane I took in central Papua New Guinea, as I sat in the co-pilots seat the plane was flown by a missionary and we landed on a grass runway which compared unfavourably with some back lawns back here in the UK, I felt distinctly nervous; or the flight we took in Malaysia many years ago when we were surprised when the man in the ticket office also checked us in and later drove the bus out to the 18-seater plane, imagine our horror when the same man turned out to be the pilot? Greeting us on the plane and clearly registering the slight look of concern on our faces he sought to reassure us with the unforgettable line “Don’t worry I have been flying for nearly a year….” Not an auspicious start and when the door would not shut properly and rattled throughout the flight, you can imagine the relief when we finally arrived and the mad dash for the ferry office the next morning to book our return trip…

The point is, many internal flights are run by less reputable airlines, with less well maintained older aircraft and require a great deal of skill to land at less well maintained and more dangerous airports; they are therefore often more dangerous than international flights governed by strict international safety standards and flying into well maintained airports with modern technology; rather than the man with a whistle I encountered in the Solomon Islands who would watch out for the plane (which would circle the island twice to ensure it had been seen) and whistle for the runway to be cleared of the football match or market that was taking place.

Yeti airline is not rated by www.airlinequality.com and this latest incident comes just two years after another fatal yeti crash. This does seem like a tragic accident, reports suggest that weather conditions changed for the worse just prior to landing with a thick fog descending on the airstrip. Sudden and severe weather changes are not unusual and you should as far as is possible do your research on both the airline and the conditions before you travel, to ensure that you reduce the risks as much as possible.

Our Gap Year and Independent Travel Safety & Awareness workshop (GYITSA) provides information on personal safety as well as the other areas of travel planning needed to reduce the risk you face when travelling to unfamiliar parts of the world. These include a session on Transport Options and Destination Advice.

Please visit our website at http://www.safegapyear.com/ or join us on Facebook. For a complete list of Blog entries visit our National Press Archive page.