Commentary: A LATAM Boeing aircraft ‘just dropped’ in mid-flight – how concerned should travellers be?

Airline incidents are rare when you consider how much travelling is taking place around the globe.

On peak travel days, there can be more than 16,000 planes in the air at any time. There are around 4 billion air travel passengers each year, and the number is expected to double by 2035 by some estimates.

The vast majority of these flights pass without incident. However, when an emergency does occur it receives a lot of attention – a lot more attention than the far more frequent crashes or other accidents that happen on our roads, for example.

So when you do hear about an incident on a plane, the first thing to do is keep it in perspective.

WHAT HAPPENED ON LATAM 800?

Authorities have not released a lot of detail on the cause of the incident, beyond saying it was a “technical fault”. As LATAM Flight 800 originated in Australia, the transportation investigation teams from Australia, New Zealand, Boeing and LATAM will scrutinise the incident to better understand what happened.

Modern airliners have redundant systems for flight-critical controls. If one fails, it can be transferred to the backup automatically or manually by the flight crew.

One passenger stated that one of the pilots said his instruments went blank, he lost control briefly, and the backup system returned the aircraft back to normal operations.