Why Are Asia’s Planes Crashing All Over the Place?

Everyone who has died flying commercial in the past year was flying aboard airlines from the East. Safety may not be able to keep up with demand.

The last place in the world where you would expect the government to announce the creation of a new airline would be Malaysia. After all, the state bankrolls Malaysia Airlines, stricken financially by the loss of Flight 370 and the destruction of Flight 17 over Ukraine.

But this week they unveiled a new carrier called flymojo—a name reflecting the informality of budget airlines rather than the pomp of a state flag carrier.

The reality is that they had little choice. Everybody in Asia wants to fly, and fly cheaply and frequently. The Malaysians’ only way to protect their domestic market was to copy the competition.

But across Asia this race to meet an unprecedented demand for air travel is seriously straining the oversight of airlines and the systems needed to ensure world-class safety. The numbers are worrying. In the last 12 months 492 people have died or gone missing, presumed dead, flying in Asia on Asian airlines. That’s significantly more fatalities than the world totals for 2011 (372), 2012 (388), and 2013 (173).

To be sure, it’s become almost obligatory when looking at air crash statistics to point out how safe flying really is: the odds of dying in an air crash have been estimated at 1 in 11 million, against 1 in 3.1 million in a shark attack, and 1 in 5,000 in a car crash.

But the Asian numbers have a specific story to tell that makes the larger picture irrelevant.

The total of 492 fatalities comes from just four crashes: 239 people lost on Malaysian Airlines Flight 370; 162 fatalities on Air Asia Flight 8501, which crashed into the Java Sea; and 91 in two crashes involving the Taiwanese commuter airline TransAsia.

Such a high toll in so few crashes is unusual because one of the most striking advances in airplane safety has been the survivability rate in crashes—often well over 50 percent of the passengers. For example, when an Asiana Airlines Boeing 777 made a violent crash landing at San Francisco in 2013, of the 291 passengers only three died and the cabin was successfully evacuated before the airplane was gutted by fire.

Yet in the four recent Asian crashes there were no survivors in the two most serious crashes, 405 people in total, and a very low survival rate in the remaining two crashes.

There are other unusual factors. In the case of AirAsia Flight 8501 something went wrong at cruise altitude—and fatal accidents very rarely happen in cruise (statistically the average is 9 percent) and the largest loss of life, on Malaysian Airlines Flight 370, also involved so far unexplained events at cruise height.  

The two TransAsia crashes involved the same type of airplane, turboprop ATR-72s, and in far more familiar circumstances, one during descent and landing (57 percent of accidents) and the other immediately after takeoff (24 percent of accidents).

It remains up to investigators to finally determine the cause of each of these crashes, and each will have its own distinct characteristics. However, there is such a striking geographical concentration here that it raises an increasingly urgent question: Are the crashes just an unlucky statistical spike or symptomatic of something serious that is being unheeded? More specifically, is the air safety regime in the Asia-Pacific region equal to the demands being made of it?

First, it’s important to understand that air crashes cannot be looked at in isolation. They most always reflect the quality of the infrastructure supporting air travel in the region where they occur.

Each year the body overseeing world aviation, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), conducts an audit of the performance of regional aviation infrastructure. This covers eight categories that are fundamental to safety: legislation, organization, licensing, operations, airworthiness, accident investigation, air navigation (air traffic control) and airports.

The system supporting commercial air travel in North America has a score of 93 percent. The worst performer is Africa, with 41 percent (Africa has by far the largest number of airlines on the European Union’s blacklist of airlines banned from flying into Europe). Asia scores 68 percent, which is a lot better but there is a huge difference in the demand for air travel in Africa and Asia.

In Asia the explosive growth of budget airlines is being driven by a vast emergent middle class – in Indonesia alone the number of airline passengers is predicted to grow from the current 85 million to 270 million by 2034, and 42 percent of world-wide deliveries of new airplanes in 2014 went to the Asia-Pacific region.

And we are now able to see that new airplanes can be delivered far faster than a mature regime for the management and safety of air travel can be. The oversight of aviation in Asian nations varies widely in quality. One of the most pressing problems is the availability of adequately experienced pilots.

There are growing concerns about a worldwide shortage of pilots but the situation has become acute in Asia. It is estimated that by 2033 the region will need a mind-boggling 216,000 more pilots, an increase of 41 percent.

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