subject: Everything You Need to Know About Airline Safety [print this page] Everything You Need to Know About Airline Safety
Human factors, design flaws, emergencies, and technical aspects are included in the components that may affect flight safety. Safety for everyone on a flight begins with the careful consideration of many technical and human issues.
Certain weather factors may influence the safety of an airplane's flight. Lightning, snow, thunderstorms, and ice are just a few of the types of weather conflicts that can arise during a flight. Airliners can and have been struck by lightning, although this only happens a couple times per year. This is usually just a frightening occurrence and not a total hazard to a flight, as airplanes can recover from a regular lightning strike of average size. Problems come about when something called positive lightning hits a plane. Positive lightning is different from negative lightning in that the charge is on the tops of the clouds rather than from the ground. While making up only a fraction of the lightning strikes that occur, these strikes are much more powerful because they have to travel such a long distance to discharge. This results in up to ten times the amount of voltage and a duration ten times longer than negative lightning strikes. Not only this, but positive lightning tends to occur on clear blue skies with few clouds. You can see why all of these facts make this type of lightning very dangerous for airplanes.
Snow and ice are sometimes of concern for taking-off and landing situations. Planes must be de-iced before taking off from an airport so that they can steer and maneuver safely in the air. However, ice can also accumulate during flight and must be avoided to stay clear of braking or steering issues later. Knowing the weather conditions throughout the flight also prevents disasters from happening, so pilots rely on weather notifications and monitoring conditions to keep informed.
Another safety issue for flights is fire. Fires on planes can occur because of electrical failures or other technical problems. The toxic gas and smoke from fires in the air primarily cause the most serious issues. Extensive testing and laboratory set-ups by engineers have prevented many possible fire disasters on airliners. Research related to layouts of seating and evacuation doors has been done to create the most effective plan for fire emergencies. Much testing has been done to put safety measures in place on planes in case of fire. Smoke hoods, fire escape plans, smoke foam paths, and numerous other ideas have been put to use on airplanes.
Mistakes by pilots may also occur during air travel. This type of human error is a major cause of airplane crashes. Pilots need to be alert, prepared, and proactive in order to prevent or resolve these types of issues. Proper training and procedure can eliminate problems while others have to do with communication failures. Communication is vital to any flight and must be handled properly. Sometimes, a mixture of design and human error may be the problem.
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