It's Raining Planes in 2009

I thought I would point out the number of commercial air flights that have crashed recently.

27 February 2009: A Turkish Airlines flight to Amsterdam airport broke into three pieces as it approached for landing. The number of dead and injured is yet unknown.

14 February 2009: 2 passengers injured at London City Airport after a British Airways flight crash landed.

12 February 2009: A passenger plane crashes into a house in Buffalo, New York, killing all 49 people on board and at least one person on the ground.

8 February 2009: A passenger plane crashes into a river in the Brazilian state of Amazonas, killing 24 people, most of whom were from the same family.

15 January 2009: A US Airways airliner on a domestic flight ditches into the Hudson River in New York. All 150 passengers, three flight attendants and two pilots were rescued in freezing weather, with no loss of life.

The reason I thought I would point it out is that it seems to have been a busy and unfortunate year for civil aviation. In any given year, there are always a handful of flights that go down in Africa, South America, Asia or the Pacific Islands which you don't really hear too much about and there is usually one or two that go down in the US and Europe. This year however has seen a number of high profile air crashes in Europe and the US. It may just be bad luck but my paranoidal lobe is twitching and I can't help thinking that the timing of this marked increase is no coincidence.

The world is struggling financially and so too I would imagine are the airlines, who will also be having to cut costs presumably to survive the economic downturn. I would hate to think that they are compromising the safety of their passengers by cutting the number of safety inspections or the quality of their replacement pars or anything like that, but I don't think that it is wholly unreasonable to point out the possibility and maybe ask some questions if aeroplanes continue to drop and kill the passengers within.