Why are aircraft taking off and landing so dangerous?

If we were chosen, we would probably choose to die while eating a better meal than die in a plane crash. With 1 in 2.5 million fatal accidents, about half of those occur during the shortest flight stages. Want to know when to worry about your next flight? Remember to fasten your seat belts.

Take-off and landing are known to be the two most dangerous stages in a flight. Take a look at the chart below. Boeing tracks and statistics all of the commercial aircraft accidents every year and sort them by time of occurrence. Boeing divides an average of a 90-minute flight into 8 phases. But we only need to focus on the following 5 stages.

Photo: Boeing

The first is two stages of takeoff and altitude. These two periods only account for 2% of the time but have an accident rate of 14%. This may seem like a very high number, but it is often seen in the height maintenance phase. This stage accounted for more than half of the flight time, but the rate of the accident was only 11%. And the rest is reduced altitude and landing. These two stages only account for 4% of the flight time, double take-off time and elevation. But the rate of accidents was soaring, the number reached 49% in a very short period of time. Therefore, the phase of the aircraft falling altitude and landing are the two most dangerous stages in a flight. So what is the reason behind it?

"Typically, when the plane takes off and lands, the aircraft will be low altitude and slow speed. When problems arise, you will not have enough time to respond ," Anthony Brickhouse, associate professor at the Embry-Riddle Aviation Academy, said.

When the aircraft is at an altitude of 10,000m, the pilot has a huge amount of time and space to solve the problem. Even when the engine is completely off, the plane cannot fall immediately to the ground. Planes can follow air currents. During this period, the aircraft will reduce altitude by about 1,600m while moving 16,000m, so pilots will have about 8 minutes to be able to find a safe landing position. But if problems occur near the ground, the time and troubleshooting space is very limited.

For commercial aircraft, take-off takes only about 30 to 35 seconds. If the engine malfunctions or the landing gear gets stuck, the pilot has almost no time to decide whether to continue taking off or try to find a way to bring this 80-ton giant bird back to the ground. Most decisions made are to continue to take off.

"Because if you are traveling on the runway at a speed of over 160 km / h then everything is very fast. Making a decision to stop taking off is very difficult because you have to do it before reaching the threshold. speed allows, if not, physically speaking, you will not be able to stop, " Brickhouse said.

If the aircraft does not take off or land at this time, it will run out of runways. And depending on the airport, at the end of the runway could be a field or a basin literally, like Telluride Regional Airport in Colorado. The two runways of this airport are abyss with a depth of about 1,000m.

For airports with dangerous runways like Telluride, the EMAS (Engineered Materials Arrestor System) will be installed . The EMAS system is a piece of material at the end of the runway that is designed to sink under the weight of the aircraft, which will hold the aircraft's gear and force it to stop before plunging into the abyss. In the event of a landing failure, the system works the same way.

So what makes the landing process much more dangerous than taking off?

The answer is very simple . Making an airplane fly into the sky is easier than making it stop . "When the aircraft is slowing down and is in the process of landing on the runway, any gust or something like that can impact the aircraft more strongly than it does during takeoff," Brickhouse explained.

During normal landing, the pilot will contact air traffic control, wait in line with the appropriate runway and notify the crew. The takeoff process is also similar. But when it landed, everything happened while the plane headed for the runway instead of leaving the runway.

"Sometimes things still work normally during landing, but at the last second something goes wrong and it leads to an accident. In other situations, although an emergency has been reported on the device. flying with the risk of landing upon landing, an unfortunate situation will also lead to an accident , " Brickhouse said.

Although the statistics seem scary, aircraft are still the safest means of transportation. And even if something goes wrong on the next flight, you still have a 95.7% chance of survival.

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