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This photo taken Tuesday, June 2, provided by ECPAD, shows French army air crewman aboard an Atlantic Model 2 aircraft, which took off from a French air base in Dakar, Senegal, patroling the presumed site of the crash of a missing Air France flight. France has three military patrol aircrafts flying over the central Atlantic from their base in Senegal and it is sending an AWACS radar plane that should join the operation on Wednesday, said French military spokesman Christophe Prazuck. (AP Photo/ECPAD/French Defense Minister)
Charlie Babbitt: All airlines have crashed at one time or another. That doesn’t mean they aren’t safe.
Raymond Babbitt: Qantas.
Charlie Babbitt: Qantas?
Raymond Babbitt: Qantas never crashed.
You may remember the above scene from the 1988 movie Rain Man, in which Tom Cruise’s character unsuccessfully tries to get his autistic savant brother, played by Dustin Hoffmann, to take an airline flight from Cincinnati to Los Angeles.
In reality, Qantas planes have crashed, but the airline has not had a fatal accident since 1951. This sort of safety record is the envy of most other air carriers and Air France is no exception.
According to airsafe.com, statistical analysis shows Air France passengers have a greater risk of being involved in a fatal accident than most all U.S. airlines and all major American carriers, although this risk remains extremely low (nearly one in a million).
Assuming that all 228 passengers and crew on board Air France Flight 447 have perished, it is the 21st worst disaster in terms of loss of life in aviation history, according to planecrashinfo.com. It is the worst disaster in the history of Air France, which dates back to 1933.
Ironically, tomorrow (June 3) marks the 37th anniversary of the worst previous fatal accident for Air France. That crash involved a Boeing 707 that was supposed to be flying from Paris to Atlanta. It made it just seven feet into the air before a faulty servo motor caused the right wing to hit the ground, leading to an explosion that killed 130 of the 132 people on board.
June 1962 was not a good month for Air France. Less than three weeks after the Paris crash, another Air France Boeing 707 crashed into a mountain forest on the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, killing 113 people.
One of the oddest coincidences in aviation annals also involved Air France and June. On June 12, 1950, an Air France Douglas DC-4 crashed into the sea while trying to land in Bahrain, killing 40 people. Just two nights later, on the same route from Pakistan, another Air France DC-4 wound up in the Persian Gulf rather than on the Bahrain runway, taking the lives of 46 people. Pilot error was blamed for both crashes.
In 1949, French boxer Marcel Cerdan (whose affair with singer Edith Piaf is portrayed in the 2007 movie La Vie en Rose) died when an Air France flight crashed in the Azores. He was on his way to New York to see Piaf.
Air France’s only other fatal crash in this decade occurred on July 25, 2000, when a chartered Concorde bound for New York City slammed into a hotel shortly after take-off from Paris’ Charles de Gaulle Airport. Some debris on the runway punctured one of the jet’s tires, a piece of which crashed into the wing structure, rupturing a fuel tank that then ignited. The crew was unable to get the jet to climb due to resulting loss of engine power. All 109 people on board the aircraft died, as well as four people on the ground. Nearly all of the dead were Germans on their way to the U.S. to board the cruise ship Deutschland for a 16-day journey to South America.
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