Many people have asked me the question: "Which airline is the safest to fly on?" My standard answer is: While the safety records of different airlines do provide a good reference, a "brand name" does not automatically make your flight safer, much less guarantee a permanent zero-accident record.
Singapore Airlines does have an outstanding flight safety record, but because plane accident rates are calculated at "per million flight hours," every major plane accident can be seen as an isolated event. Each accident is caused by a combination of certain specific circumstances. Therefore, flight safety does not depend on a "brand name" but on continuous joint efforts by government authorities, airline employees and the general public.
After Tuesday's accident, many people may be asking yet another question: which part of the plane is the safest? The answer: so far we do not have any scientific evidence indicating which part of a plane may be the safest. In fact, carefully reading safety instructions and listening to the crew's emergency demonstrations make a much bigger difference in guaranteeing flight safety than where you sit.
Also, the distribution of weight on an aircraft affects its stability. An aircraft's seating is arranged according to weight-balance analyses. Therefore, changing your seat at will may have an adverse affect on flight safety.
Many people harbor a fatalistic attitude while flying on aircraft. They believe if there is a disaster waiting for you, you can't avoid it. As a result, they do not pay heed to safety instructions or the crew's demonstrations. However, catastrophic plane accidents -- in which no passenger has any chance of survival -- occur much less frequently than we imagine. Certainly, a change in attitude, from fatalistic to alert and arranging for air travel accordingly can better guarantee passengers safe flights.
Jing Hung-sying is a professor in the department of aeronautics and astronautics at National Cheng Kung University.
Translated by Francis Huang.
The conflict in the Middle East has been disrupting financial markets, raising concerns about rising inflationary pressures and global economic growth. One market that some investors are particularly worried about has not been heavily covered in the news: the private credit market. Even before the joint US-Israeli attacks on Iran on Feb. 28, global capital markets had faced growing structural pressure — the deteriorating funding conditions in the private credit market. The private credit market is where companies borrow funds directly from nonbank financial institutions such as asset management companies, insurance companies and private lending platforms. Its popularity has risen since
The Donald Trump administration’s approach to China broadly, and to cross-Strait relations in particular, remains a conundrum. The 2025 US National Security Strategy prioritized the defense of Taiwan in a way that surprised some observers of the Trump administration: “Deterring a conflict over Taiwan, ideally by preserving military overmatch, is a priority.” Two months later, Taiwan went entirely unmentioned in the US National Defense Strategy, as did military overmatch vis-a-vis China, giving renewed cause for concern. How to interpret these varying statements remains an open question. In both documents, the Indo-Pacific is listed as a second priority behind homeland defense and
Every analyst watching Iran’s succession crisis is asking who would replace supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Yet, the real question is whether China has learned enough from the Persian Gulf to survive a war over Taiwan. Beijing purchases roughly 90 percent of Iran’s exported crude — some 1.61 million barrels per day last year — and holds a US$400 billion, 25-year cooperation agreement binding it to Tehran’s stability. However, this is not simply the story of a patron protecting an investment. China has spent years engineering a sanctions-evasion architecture that was never really about Iran — it was about Taiwan. The
In an op-ed published in Foreign Affairs on Tuesday, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) said that Taiwan should not have to choose between aligning with Beijing or Washington, and advocated for cooperation with Beijing under the so-called “1992 consensus” as a form of “strategic ambiguity.” However, Cheng has either misunderstood the geopolitical reality and chosen appeasement, or is trying to fool an international audience with her doublespeak; nonetheless, it risks sending the wrong message to Taiwan’s democratic allies and partners. Cheng stressed that “Taiwan does not have to choose,” as while Beijing and Washington compete, Taiwan is strongest when
RSS