Accidents: Human error concern

2007-11-08 23:05

Erika Gibson

Pretoria - The number of accidents involving aircraft and air deaths in South Africa have dropped in the past 10 years, while the number of aircraft has nearly tripled in that time.

Acccording to aviation expert Linden Birns, there were 145 flying accidents last year, when there were more than 50 000 flights.

Birns has analysed the aircraft accident statistics of the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) for the period 1996 to 2006.

He was responding to questions about the apparent increase recently in the number of aircraft accidents.

There have been three incidents at Cape Town International Airport in the past week - a passenger plane slid off a runway, a runaway baggage trolley injured three people and a Nationwide Airline's jet lost an engine.

107 blamed on human error

Birns said: "The average number of crashes in the past 10 years is about 150 a year."

What was more worrying was that 107 of the 145 accidents last year could be attributed to human error on the part of flight crews.

There were also 23 cases of mechanical or engine problems, 11 were caused by weather conditions, 10 were maintenance-related and six were crashes.

- Beeld