For those of you who wish to expore these topics further:
A fine treatment of all aspects of flight safety, and accident statistics by aircraft type:
http://airsafe.com/
To find out what really holds planes up (goes some way to explaining why lay people get so confused):
http://www.aa.washington.edu/faculty/eberhardt/lift.htm
Lay description of advances in aircraft design in recent years:
http://www.patprojects.org/dec98sca/boeing.htm
The books:
“Air Disaster” (Vol 1-4) by MacArthur Job
A “must read” for anybody interested in failure analysis and forensic engineering. The treatment is not highly technical and gives some insight into how accident analysis leads to improvements in engineering.
Zhukov, how much more nonsense must we endure? Engineers who design these systems try very hard to ensure their safety, and by and large their efforts pay off. Engineering practice improves all the time. Does this imply engineers working 30 years ago were acting irresponsibly if they did not understand everything yet let their planes fly? Surely not, success depends on balancing benefit (most aircraft designs appear to be sound), with risk (what might we have missed, or could improve given more time). This argument also extends to operation and maintainence. We don’t for example dismantle every plane after every trip to check if something might be wrong. Some economic balance is found.
Occasionally problems slip through but they are specific, not general. For example “The Airbus is dangerous” is not helpful or informative unless you have some evidence that the whole organization conspires to make dangerous planes, or you know all models crash excessively (yes, Airbus has flown far enough for the figures to be quite meaningful). Saying the A300 (might) have a problem with a tailplane does not mean all fly-by-wire aircraft should be grounded (the A320 and the B777 ?). The argument ‘Europeans (or was it French) don’t know how to make planes’, is likewise a bit of a stretch.
When something fails it tells engineers there is a problem that needs to be checked. Air crash investigators try to diagnose the problem and understanding is improved. The problem can hopefully be avoided in future.
Luckily most problems are found in design and test and by and large the public are not victims of a wicked sadistic test plan by the airlines. When a problem is found with one plane, other planes of the type or comparable design are checked or analysed to see if they could have the same problem.
However, building a conspiricy theory that Airbus or China Airlines are lax in their business activites needs some proof. Although there have been few examples of companies who purposely built dangerous planes, there are certainly examples of operators who did not maintain them correctly (for example Aloha Airlines after an incident with a 737-200 on 4/28/1988), this is usually shown by maintanence records.
It will certainly be interesting to see if China Airlines is responsible again for the recent crash… but it would be wiser not to speculate.