Planes

As a resident airline geek I felt it was incumbent upon myself to write something about the shooting on an AA 757 in Miami yesterday. I felt I needed to however there was nothing to say...boring story. The most interesting thing I could think of was that the wife was from Milwaukee, and that the couple had lived here on the fashionable east side for a time in the 80's. Just imagine the guy from the picture with a mullet prowling the bars of North Avenue. That's all I had.

However I no longer have to write any of that boring-ass shit because this evening a Southwest 737-700 ran off the runway while landing at Chicago-Midway in the middle of a snowstorm. Continuing its slide through a concrete wall and onto a side street where it struck a passing car and killed a 6-year old boy. This of course threw the airline world into a tizzy. On the airliners.net message board people were going berserk, and I just sat back and watched. People were losing it because Southwest's safety record is the envy of the industry, in that they have never had a fatal accident. Now many airlines have flawless safety records but only a select few have been able to maintain that record over a long period of time.

Qantas is a name that keeps coming up when safety records are mentioned because since Qantas was established as the Queensland and Northern Territories Aeronautical Services company in 1922, they have not had a single fatality on any of their aircraft. A fact made famous in the 1987 movie "Rainman". Many people online have argued that Qantas has had fatal events in the past but they confuse Qantas with two other companies who have had a few crack-ups, TAA (Trans Australian Airlines) and ANA (Australian National Airlines [not to be confused with ANA All Nippon Airlines of Japan which is still flying]) Who would merge to form Ansett Australian Airlines, which went bankrupt and shut down in 2002.

Despite Qantas' record it pales in comparison with Southwest's. While Qantas is older and has a worldwide route network, Southwest has had more flights. Qantas has had about 3 million, give or take, flight segments in its history (one flight segment constitutes one takeoff and landing) Southwest, on the other hand, while founded in 1971, has had about 11 million flight segments, give or take, mostly short hops.

Which is not to say that either airline has not had incidents. In 1999 a landing Qantas 747-400 overshot the runway in Bangkok and ended up on a golf course. It was pure luck that the plane did not hit anything that would burst the fuel tanks on its wild ride, and the pilots surely had horsehoes up their asses on that day. A landing Southwest plane overshot the runway (seeing a pattern here?) in Burbank in 2000, famously coming to rest next to a Chevron station. The CVR (cockpit voice recorder) heard the pilot say "well there goes my career" after all the passengers had evacuated. He was right, he got canned 3 months later.

So what do we make of this latest incident. Is it a crash? The plane will probably fly again. Is Southwest's rep. now tarnished ? No passengers died but a little boy in a passing car did. Let the debate begin.

And before you can say anything, I am already aware that I am a geek.