Fly is Bad

Indonesia is not having any luck with airlines.

Around New Year's, an Adam Air jet fell out of the sky and ended up somewhere in the ocean. No one survived.

A couple weeks ago, yet another Adam Air jet landed at the airport in Jakarta and promptly cracked in half, its back end slumping sadly on the runway like a bent cardboard tube. No one was hurt.

The country's budget airlines always seemed a bit dodgy. There are endless angry letters to the editor of The Jakarta Post about how people paid for tickets only to find out at the counter that their payment had mysteriously disappeared and they'd have to pay again. Safety regulations and standards have been questioned. Budget airlines have budget airlines--the photo above is of Wings Air, which is a budget carrier for the budget carrier Lion Air. As you can see by the carefully worded slogan the airline has chosen to represent itself with, Fly is indeed Cheap.

This does not mean Fly is Good.

When planning school field trips, there has been pretty much only one Indonesian airline that parents will allow us to use--Garuda, the national carrier. Still, when flying overseas for school field trips, travel agents still suggest using foreign airlines. I'm currently making travel arrangements for about 30 8th graders and four teachers to Singapore, and the travel agent is pretty adamant that we use Singapore Air, even though it's only an hour or so flight. (I'm not complaining--Singapore Air is pretty much the Rolls Royce of airlines.) Still, we've flown Garuda plenty of times. Any time we travel within the country, in fact, we fly with them. It's always been quite nice, except for the time when a really fat guy sat next to us and Travis and I had to pretty much share one seat. (Indonesian airlines don't have the "if your butt can't fit into one seat, you have to pay for two" policies that U.S. carriers do...gee, I wonder why...)

Today a Garuda flight from Jakarta landed at the Yogyakarta airport and burst into flames. Photos accompanying news stories have shown charred bits of airplane, which is never a good sign. So far eight people have died.

No one really knows anything else at this point, but because it's the third airline incident in three months, and the fifth or sixth major transportation disaster since Christmas (a couple ferries have sunk and/or caught on fire) it doesn't look good.

I've never been afraid to fly before--I reason I'm far more likely to get killed by some psychotic trucker on Interstate 80 than I am to have my plane hijacked by a terrorist--but this is kind of alarming. Airline maintenance and safety is one of those things I think I just kind of take for granted. I always kind of, perhaps naively, figured that it's an absolutely top priority to have qualified technicians and mechanics making sure that the plane's wings won't start flapping or fall off mid-flight, and the like. Recent events kind of lead me to wonder if maybe this isn't every airline's top priority--if perhaps making and saving money are a little more important than the personal safety of passengers.

We might be steering clear of Indonesian airlines for a while. Maybe Fly won't be as Cheap, but at least it will be Safe.