Boeing 737 plane crashes spark concern over flight safety
Ethiopian Airlines' Boeing 737 Max 8 jetliner carrying 157 people crashed shortly after takeoff Sunday, March 10, killing everyone aboard, authorities said.
Photo courtesy of Ben Curtis (AP Photo)
After hundreds of flight-related deaths last year, the Ethiopian Airlines crash earlier this month has frequent flyers on edge.
Five months after a Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft plummeted into the sea in Indonesia, the same model drove Flight 302 to the ground in Ethiopia, raising concerns about air travel safety.
A BBC report features a timeline of air disasters from the past two decades. While 2017 was crowned as the safest in aviation history, 2018 had an increased number of plane crashes, leading to 556 deaths.
Southwest and American Airlines came under fire following the crash, as they held 34 and 24 Max 8s respectively.
Countries like France, Germany, Indonesia and Australia ordered the grounding of the model early in the wake of the crash, while the United States ordered the grounding of the Boeing 737 Max planes in the past week, citing satellite evidence of similarities between this crash and the Lion Air flight that crashed in Indonesia.
Freshman digital media major Rebecca Olson, whose father is a pilot with Delta Airlines, said because financial considerations are involved in grounding planes, U.S. airlines probably wanted to consider for a moment that the two incidents could have been related by coincidence and not a faulty model.
Olson explained her father does not share much about his flight experience, but he takes his job very seriously. She said news about plane crashes makes her apprehensive because she fears it could one day be her dad.
Despite this worry, Olson said these incidents seem distant because she does not know anyone who has ever been in a plane accident.
“I get a little scared over turbulence, but nothing out of the ordinary has happened in my flights,” Olson said.
Boeing, the largest seller of commercial and military aircraft in the aviation industry, has temporarily suspended the delivery of 737 Max planes but is continuing its production.
Senior digital media major Stephanie Ferrell is from New Mexico, and she often flies to go back home. Ferrell said grounding the planes is the right reaction to the crash, but experts should look into it closely.
“Plane accidents don’t occur as often as other kinds of traffic accidents like a bus or a car, so usually I am not very panicked or anxious about flying,” Ferrell said. “I would rather be safe than sorry, so if there is a reoccurrence of the same exact model causing accidents, it is more likely that is an engineering failure.”
At this time, investigators are still looking into the crash and the Boeing 737 Max planes and decisions regarding the grounding of these planes are still being taken into consideration.
