Another Fatal Air Crash. How Safe Is Air Travel?

Statistically speaking, air travel was considered to be the safest form of commuting. However, with yet another civilian air crash, serious doubts are emerging from air travelers and from the authorities regarding the safety of air travel.

A Yemeni Airbus A310-300 of the Yemenia Airways carrying 153 passengers on-board crashed today into the sea off the Indian Ocean. The crash took place, during the arrival of the flight at the island nation of Comoros from Yemen’s capital, Sanaa. Speculations suggest that the crash took place due to bad weather conditions. Rescue services have plucked out a child alive from the sea, who was on board the Airbus A310-300. The child is the sole known survivor of the crash and now has been taken to the medical center. All other passengers are presumed dead.

According to the manager of the international airport in Moroni, the rescued child is five years old and with the child, five other bodies have been located and recovered. The Yemenia Airways also had 66 French nationals, as the the flight was in the final leg of its journey from Paris and Marseille to Comoros via Yemen. Passengers from other nationalities were also on board, including foreign nationals from Canada, Comoros, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Morocco, the Palestinian territories, the Philippines and Yemen on the plane.

This is the second Airbus crash this month alone. Earlier, an Air France Airbus A330-200 plunged into the Atlantic Ocean killing all 228 passengers. This latest crash happened in a A310. The passenger of today’s crash first boarded A310 from Comoros, where they began their second leg of the journey and ended in disaster.

According to the Dominique Bussereau (French Transport Minister), there had been some faults that had been detected in the Yemenia A310 in the year 2007, during routine inspections in France. Since then, this flight hadn’t flown to Paris, until now.

In a statement, Bussereau said,