The Qantas jet managed to land on a wing and a prayer:
As the investigation unfolds, it’s becoming clear that the 365 passengers and crew aboard Qantas flight 30, which made an emergency landing in Manila on July 25th, are lucky to be alive. The Boeing 747-400 suffered an explosive decompression 29,000 feet over the South China Sea. The explosion — apparently caused by a defective oxygen cylinder in the baggage hold — blew a three-metre hole in the side of the fuselage. In a similar accident in 1996, when oxygen generators in the baggage hold of a ValuJet DC-9 exploded over the Everglades, all 110 people on board perished.
Actually, I’m told that the 10′ hole in the outer hull — light-weight aluminum fairing used to blend the wing into the body for aerodynamic purposes — was largely cosmetic; the hole in the inner, pressurized hull was much smaller.
Anyway, air travel safety has improved dramatically over the years:
Back in the 1920s, when air travel was just getting underway, the safety figures were horrendous. In fact, America’s worst year on record remains 1929, when 61 people died in air crashes — equal then to one fatality for every million person-miles. Given our present volume of air travel, that would equate to 7,000 deaths a year today.Mercifully, air travel is thousands of times safer nowadays. Over the past decade, the number of air fatalities has averaged no more than one per two billion person-miles. That doesn’t include the effects of terrorism, but even the attacks of September 2001 only raised fatalities to one death per billion person-miles.
For comparison purposes, 1.3 motorists die per 100m vehicle-miles. That’s equivalent to around 30 deaths per billion person-miles when each accident involves at least a couple of fatalities.