Airline Accidents - More and More People Survive
The last four airline accidents have one thing in common: everyone survived. A US Airways jet that landed on the Hudson River in January showed that emergency landings are not always deadly.
It may be luck sometimes but it is also because crews react in a better way and are better trained. Airplanes are also built so that they can survive crashes more easily.
In December a Continental Airlines jet slid off the runway and caught fire in Denver. A year ago a British Airways plane crash-landed in London. In both accidents nobody was killed.
In the last seven years fewer than a hundred passengers have been killed in major airline accidents. The survival rate has gone up and the number of crashes down.
The airline industry says that everything, from building a plane to keeping them in a good condition, has been improved. Seats have become stronger and hardware on planes is better. Flight attendants and pilots are even more professional. Everyone survived on the Hudson and in Denver because flight attendants and crew were able to get the passengers out quickly.
Another reason for the higher survival rate may be the fact that flight attendants are getting more experienced and have better training because airlines have not taken up many new people after 9/11.
Airplane Landing on the Hudson River
- 9/11 = September 11, 2001, the day on which terrorists attacked America with airplanes
- crew = all the people who work on a plane
- emergency landing = when a plane has to come down in a place that was not planned
- experienced = if you can do something very well because you have done it often
- flight attendant = someone who serves drinks and food on a plane
- slide - slid = to move smoothly over a surface
- survival rate = the people who survive a crash compared to all the people who are on the plane