Autumn is called ‘fall’ in the US (as it used to be in England), which is a good word, evoking leaves gently flapping in the breeze – not airliners tumbling out of the sky.
Alas, that very fate befell the Russian Airbus A321 that crashed over Sinai, killing all 224 passengers and crew on board.
When such a tragedy happens, the natural question is why. Sometimes the answer is clear, as in the case of the Malaysian Boeing brought down by a Russian BUK missile over the Ukraine.
Since that incident implicated the government of a large country armed with nuclear weapons, it took a year-long investigation before fingers got to be pointed in earnest, but let’s face it: only fanatical champions of Col. Putin refused to see the obvious straight away.
The Sinai crash is still being investigated, and its cause is still unknown. But certain conclusions can already be drawn, certain options ruled out or in.
One of the former is the ISIS claim of responsibility, with pride and glee dripping from ever word. A display of such feelings over 224 innocent deaths says a lot about champions of the religion of peace, but that’s a separate subject. Yet ISIS still isn’t equipped with missiles boasting enough range to hit a plane flying at 31,000 feet, which is what they claimed.
Of course ISIS could have planted a bomb before the airliner took off from Cairo, and such a trick can’t be as hard to pull off there as at a Western airport: in a Muslim country there has to be more ambient sympathy to the ISIS cause among the staff.
The crash is consistent with this theory. The plane didn’t experience any engine failure, and the pilots didn’t send any distress signals. The analysis of the debris shows that the Airbus broke in half in the air, which of course could have been caused by an explosive device.
But there may be an explanation both more innocent and as criminal: an aircraft passed as flight-worthy really wasn’t.
Russian airlines lead the world by a wide margin in both the number of the deadliest crashes and their death toll. Even the state-owned Aeroflot has an appalling safety record, to say nothing of smaller cowboy airlines, such as the one that owned the A321.
If you believe Putin’s propagandists, the mysterious Russian soul is too preoccupied with matters of the spirit to pay sufficient attention to such mundane matters as air safety. Hence Russian pilots routinely shorten to zero the distance between bottle and throttle, and quite a few drunk fliers have been prevented from climbing into the cockpit at Western airports.
In one instance, a Russian pilot was actually arrested in Denmark. In another colourful tragedy, albeit one that happened quite a few years ago, a pilot gave his little son a ride in the cockpit. When the plane was over Siberia, he put the plane in autopilot and let the boy play with the controls while he himself answered a call of nature. The tot accidentally disengaged the autopilot, and the airliner plunged to its death.
Another frequent reason for crashes is the lackadaisical work ethic of ground crews, who also like the odd lemonade before dinner (or a gulp of antifreeze when lemonade isn’t available).
Though this plane was registered and serviced in Ireland, it was owned by an iffy Russian company Kogalymavia, and I can’t help thinking that Russian practices just might have rubbed off on the Irish – especially since the A321’s service record is consistent with the accident (if that’s what it was).
In 2001 the plane suffered a tailstrike, which technical term describes the tail end hitting the runway on landing or take-off. This usually happens when the pilot either pulls up or raises the nose too aggressively, which Russian pilots, with their daredevil nature preoccupied with metaphysical concerns, have been known to do.
Usually a tailstrike leads to no immediate danger, but the effect may be delayed. The subsequent repairs, if done in a slapdash manner, may cause a later structural failure of the airframe after repeated cycles of pressurisation and depressurisation at the weak point.
Such damage is historically hard to detect at certification checks, and many a Russian plane has come apart in the air due to structural defects or metal fatigue.
All this is of course speculation. But the possibilities aren’t limitless: planes don’t just happen to disintegrate in the air for no reason, giving the pilots not even a second to scream ‘Mayday!’.
Whether the crash was caused by a criminal act or criminal negligence, criminal remains the common denominator. The numerator is the 224 corpses. RIP.