.jpg?20250617')
The skies over India and our hearts are both darkened by what is shaping to be one of the deadliest air crashes in Indian aviation history. If you see the arc of civil aviation accidents, the early years involved small sightseeing trips and, as commercial aircraft grew in size, the number of casualties also increased. The two worst air crashes in history are recorded as the loss of 537 lives in the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in July 2014 and the death of 583 passengers when a KLM and Pan Am plane – both Boeing behemoths – collided in Tenerife, Spain in 1977.
And still, civil aviation is considered one of the safest ways to travel – especially long distances. Statistics show that the death risk per air passenger is about 1 in 100 million. Compare those odds to death in a road accident – did you know that road traffic accidents are the world’s leading cause of death for children and young adults in the 5 to 29 age group? We ourselves saw the tragedy that befell a Bahrain family recently when the young parents – and last week, the youngest of their three children - lost their lives and two injured by a driver who was allegedly driving under the influence.
Despite Bahrain’s strict traffic rules, we still see so many flagrant violations that endanger every other user on the road – the other vehicle drivers and passengers, as well as pedestrians. Children hanging out of rear windows or jumping to peek through the sun roof – or worst, kids seated in the driver’s lap, the parent casually steering the car with one hand and holding the squirming child with the other. Of course, everybody seems to have forgotten the no-mobile-when-driving rule long ago.
And yet, even the worst disasters record miraculous survivor tales. The sole AI171 crash survivor, 38-year-old British national Ramesh Viswashkumar, walked away with nothing more than bad bruising. His seat was switched at the last minute from a centre seat to one next to the emergency exit and he jumped out of that door which was torn away from the crashed aircraft to escape the burning wreckage.
He becomes one in a heart-stopping list of 85 sole survivors whose amazing survival stories span the Amazon rainforest and which includes a 14-month toddler in a Vietnam Airlines aircrash of 1997.
People following Viswashkumar’s story have marvelled that when your time is not up, even death cannot take you away. However, the converse is also true. Take the case of millionaire businessman Sunjay Kapur. An avid polo player and fitness enthusiast, Kapur tweeted a message of condolence for the Air India flight victims and mounted his horse for a polo match in England. Minutes later, he was dead in a bizarre accident. Apparently, in the rush of the game, he swallowed a bee which entered his mouth and stung the inside of his throat. The allergic reaction led to a massive heart attack that killed him on the spot.
As the poet John Donne reminded us:
‘Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow
Die not..’
meeraresponse@gmail.com
&uuid=(email))