Any airlines trying to break the rules might get away with it once in a small way, but if they keep on trying they will lose their licence. Yet in some countries the civil aviation authority doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do, and you have a watchdog only in name.”Mr Learmount is insistent that modern jet airliners have themselves never been so safe to fly. The enhanced proximity warning device, mandatory on all new planes for the last decade, makes it virtually impossible for a captain to fly his aircraft straight into a mountain hidden in cloud, which for many years was the biggest single cause of air passenger death.The digital instrument technology in the cockpit now is much more informative and reliable than the old battery of dials which used to face pilots, he says. “In most of the Western world, civil aviation authorities do the job they’re supposed to do. Whereas the serious airlines of the world train their crews a damn sight better.”It was the same with aviation regulatory authorities, he said.

Some described a loud bang while the plane was still in flight, followed by a ball of fire.
“It happened very fast, no one even had time to panic,” said Rohadi Kamsah Sitepu, 35, from his hospital bed. The Grey Area, made in 2002, is a good place to start, and shows Dawson has a talent for creating great-looking, atmospheric modern ballet. He twists classical shapes mostly out of recognition but makes good use of the dancers’ technical prowess, emphasising 180-degree angles or the gorgeous curve of a long leg and powerful pointe. It is all beautifully lit, in soft streaks of light and dim shadows, highlighting the dancers’ flesh in an almost fetishistic fashion.
The opening sees three dancers make a string of molten moves in parallel lines across the stage, shifting their hips so that their bodies bend from concave to convex. In some countries, crews get trained according to the law, but trained to a minimum standard. All modern airplanes are safe, but they may not be if they don’t get maintained properly and the crews don’t get trained properly. It’s about who operates it, and what their safety standards are.

What do you think ? Probably, that the driver made a mistake.”It’s the same with an aircraft. But the chances of crashing when you fly with airlines coming from outside of western Europe, North America and Australasia are an order of magnitude greater.”This is because countries which are more modern, politically and economically, have the luxury of a safety culture, which applies to everything, such as road safety, and not just aviation.”Mr Learmount went on: “If you pass a road crash do you stop and look at what make of car it is? No. There are massively different standards of safety achieved by airlines in different parts of the world. African airlines have always been the least safe to fly with: there are exceptions, such as South African Airways, and Ethiopian Airlines, interestingly enough, is another, but on the whole they have a pretty awful record.

Latin America had been getting better than it used to be recently, but perhaps it’s reverting to type, I don’t know, and Indonesia has always been poor.”The advice is and always has been, fly with the majors, because they have a superb safety record. He says modern aircraft are far safer than their predecessors, incorporating key new features such as the enhanced ground proximity warning system, which has eliminated what was the major cause of air passenger death – controlled flight into the ground (a plane hitting a mountain the captain did not know was there.)Instead, Mr Learmount points to a very different and perhaps uncomfortable conclusion: culture.Specifically, he says that the less-developed countries have a much less strong safety culture, in every way, than the developed West, and that when this consideration is applied to air transport, it means that flying on airlines other than the “majors” – the big names such as British Airways, United, Lufthansa or Air France – is simply not as safe.”Statistics tell us that it’s safe to fly, but they also tell us who it’s safe to fly with,” he says.”If you take these recent crashes, apart from the Air France one, where everybody got out safely, as they were meant to do, ask yourself if you have heard of the airlines concerned.”(They are, respectively, Turinter from Tunisia, Helios from Cyprus, West Caribbean from Colombia, TANS from Peru and Mandala from Indonesia.)”The answer is that you haven’t This is not surprising, this is fact. “It’s a very, very long time since we’ve had this many, even in one year, and it’s a really freakish time,” he said.But ask him if commercial flight is becoming less safe, as passenger numbers continue to boom and more and more planes take to the skies, and he denies it robustly. And it had aviation experts wondering at the biggest series of air disasters for several years.Six major crashes in as many weeks: is this just random coincidence, or something more disturbing? In disasters from Greece to Peru, from Sicily to Venzuela, and now in Indonesia, nearly 500 people have lost their lives; and but for a remarkable escape another 300 would have died when their Air France airbus hit the deck at Toronto’s Pearson airport on 2 August, at the start of the current spate of incidents.David Learmount, operations and safety editor of the magazine Flight International, is one of the world’s leading experts on air safety, and he agrees that the current round of accidents is remarkable.

I can’t believe it.”When the Mandala Airlines plane crashed in overcast weather 500 metres from the airport at Medan in north Sumatra, shoving aside cars and motorcycles before ploughing into a row of houses in a fireball, it killed at least 147 people, many of them on the ground. I struggled to take off my seat belt and then ran through a hole in the fuselage, jumping over charred bodies scattered all over the road.”Mr Sitepu, who escaped with minor bruises to his legs, said” “It’s a miracle I survived. “There was an explosion outside the plane followed by huge flames inside the cabin Then we crashed. Survivors said the Jakarta-bound plane started shaking when it reached an altitude of about 300ft before tilting sharply and smashing to the ground. All in all, a successful launch for Sputnik.To 10 September (020-7837 7816). In was the sixth major air crash in as many weeks: the Boeing 737 shook violently seconds after take-off, veered to the left and slammed on to a busy street in Indonesia’s third-largest city yesterday, bursting into flames.