How to pick your flights

There have been a lot of plane accidents recently. A lot! Malaysia Airlines, Air Algerie, TransAsia Airways, and - you guessed it - Malaysia Airlines again. While this is tragic, I am not surprised by at least a few of the recent crashes and accidents. Pretty much all of the airlines that crashed this year I would not have flown. Why, you may ask. Malaysia Airlines was recently ranked one of the best airlines, according to, well, some ranking. I am not a big fan of most airline rankings. What they rank is mostly service, not safety. An airline can have the best service in the world, if they are not safe, I would never fly them. And neither should you.

A few friends have asked me recently how I pick my flights. In this post, I'd like to offer a few suggestions and personal guidelines. That doesn't mean that the flights I pick are absolutely safe. Flying is a very unnatural thing for human beings. It means we have to rely on the abilities and judgements of the pilots. We have to trust the people who maintain the planes. All these people are human beings and human beings make mistakes. So flying will never be 100 percent safe. But there are a few things you can do to be just a little bit safer in the air.

Here is my personal checklist for picking a flight:

1. Never fly with an airline that is based in a country which is not known for having an eye for detail. Ask yourself this question: Do people in this country do a good job at avoiding problems or does the culture prefer to deal with problems when they occur? People in most Western countries generally try to avoid problems. That's why we have our cars checked regularly. That's why we go to the doctor once a year for a check-up. However, there are cultures on this planet that usually deal with problems as they occur. They don't necessarily try to avoid them or prepare for them. Most of these countries are in Africa and Southeast Asia. When you're in the air, you don't want your pilots to deal with issues as they occur. You want them to fly a plane that is well maintained and won't force them to deal with problems in the air. Examples of these countries are Zimbabwe, Algeria, Kenya, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Thailand, and Malaysia.
2. Try to avoid flying airlines from countries, where it is not common for a "lowly worker" to express his opinion to his superior. If you're the co-pilot and your "superior" pilot makes a mistake, you need to be able to confront the pilot. That's the whole reason why there are still two people in the cockpit - redundancy and checks. An Asiana 777 crash-landed in San Francisco last year because a co-pilot didn't dare point out an error to a pilot. So avoid airlines from most far-eastern countries like Japan, South Korea, China, and Taiwan.
3. This is a quick and obvious rule - don't fly with an airline that has been reprimanded repeatedly by authorities because of insufficient or improper maintenance. Examples of these airlines are Southwest Airlines, Onur Air, and Iran Air.
4. When you choose a flight, also check what plane you will be flying. Try to avoid planes that are decades old and will be disposed of by the airline soon. The airlines are generally not interested in investing a lot of money in these older planes. Try to avoid planes that have crashed a lot or have been involved in many accidents (there's obviously a reason for that!). Planes to avoid are all MDs, everything that starts with "DC," pretty much all Russian planes, and I personally try to avoid propeller planes. Also avoid the 707, 727, and the 737 versions 100 to 600. If your plane is not on the following list, you shouldn't fly it: Airbus A318, A319, A320, A321, A330, A340, A380, Boeing 737 (versions 700 - 900), 747 (versions 400 and 8), 757-300 (some 200 are okay too), 767-400 (some 200 and 300 are okay too), all 777s, all 787s, Embraer 160 and up, Canadair RegionalJet 700 and up. Try to avoid flying on a plane that just entered the market. Give it a year before flying on it (e.g., Boeing 787, Airbus A350).
5. Last but not least, generally try to avoid regional airlines that fly propeller planes, Embraer 120-series planes, or small Canadair RegionalJets. The pilots sometimes make $30,000 a year and are often those who have been rejected by the bigger airlines (probably for a reason).

I've been following this list as best as I can for years. It doesn't always work - for example, I sometimes have to fly regional airlines because no other airline is flying to my destination. Most of the time, this checklist is a very good guide though. I would not have been on any of the planes that crashed recently just because of this list. Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.

What happened to Malaysia Airlines flight MH 370?

The Malaysia Airlines 777-200ER that went missing.

I went to cnn.com last night around 8:10 p.m. ET for my evening news update and was shocked to see that a Malaysia Airlines jetliner disappeared in the afternoon (U.S. Eastern Time). Flight MH 370 was en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing and operated on a Boeing 777-200ER.

Quite a few people have asked me since yesterday what I think happened. When you read the following, please keep in mind that I am not a pilot and everything I share here is based on information that is publicly available. So these are just my thoughts.

The first thing that came to my mind was, "Oh god, it's Air France flight 447 all over again!" (AF 447 crashed over the Atlantic in June 2009.) So let's start with that thought. Yes, there are a few similarities with AF 447, but there are important differences as well. What are the similarities? In both cases, a modern two-engine airplane disappeared in-flight, out of the blue, with no distress signals. Both flights were piloted by fairly experienced flight crews. Both planes crashed over the ocean.

However, there are striking differences. The Malaysia Airlines jet was a Boeing 777, which does have fly-by-wire avionics, but - on a 777, in contrast to the Airbus A330, which was used for AF 447 - the pilots can override the system on the 777. So in the case of MH 370, the possibility of a flight computer going bananas and crashing the plane is close to impossible (for AF 447, that was the speculation in the beginning). Another major difference is that MH 370 did not traverse an area of violent weather like the intertropical convergence zone (ITCZ). The weather over the South China Sea was very calm, with no thunderstorms, not even a lot of clouds. So MH 370 did not - like AF 447 - have to maneuver around thunderstorm cells and cumulonimbus clouds. The pilots of MH 370 did not report any severe turbulence. Also, MH 370 did not send any error messages - as AF 447 did - to Boeing or Malaysia Airlines before the crash, so the on-board systems seemed to be working just fine.

So what do we know about MH 370? We know that the flight had reached its cruising altitude of 35,000 feet, which is the safest phase of every flight. It was about 40 minutes into its flight and, until then, no anomalies had been reported. The contact to MH 370 was lost just when it was supposed to make contact with Ho Chi Minh Control Center in Vietnam. According to Chinese sources mentioned in The Aviation Herald, "radar data suggest a steep and sudden descent of the aircraft, during which the track of the aircraft changed from 024 degrees to 333 degrees." This is a pretty significant change in flight direction. Some Tweets last night speculated that MH 370 wanted to turn around or toward land, but I doubt that is true. The same speculations were made for AF 447 back in 2009. I think the turn was already part of the steep descend during the crash and was not controlled.

Now comes the mysterious part, and you can make of this whatever you want - two of the passengers on board MH 370 were traveling with stolen passports. I think we need to be careful what this means. It could just be two people traveling with fake passports, a coincidence. Or it could mean there was something wrong with these two people and there's a relationship to the crash.

Let me be pretty blunt here - a 777 does not just fall out of the sky. Especially not when the flight has reached its cruising altitude. Also, the kerosene traces found on the ocean point to the fact that MH 370 did not explode. It looks like the fuel tanks were intact when the plane hit the ocean (obviously, this is only correct if the oil traces were in fact caused by MH 370). Given all this - no explosion, no error messages, no bad weather - the options of what could have happened are fairly limited. A few people have speculated about a terrorist attack. I think that is highly unlikely as well. Terrorism only works by creating fear and claiming responsibility. So far, no terrorist organization or individuals have claimed responsibility for the crash. So terrorism is really not a realistic scenario here.

But what are realistic scenarios? To me, there are only two possibilities at this point:

1) The two people with the stolen passports were involved. Somehow, they took control of the cockpit and crashed the plane. Maybe they wanted to divert the plane, but the pilots didn't cooperate. They could have removed the pilots from the cockpit (or killed them) and tried to fly the aircraft themselves. As sophisticated as the 777 is, it's close to impossible to fly without experience. A similar scenario would be that one of the pilots wanted to commit suicide. You think this is unrealistic? Then check out this Wikipedia entry.

2) The only other option is that some technical or mechanical failure happened and the pilots were too busy figuring out what was going on to radio mayday or send a distress signal. That was the case with AF 447. If the Chinese reports are true and MH 370 did descend quickly and steeply, that could point to a deep stall, just as what happened with AF 447. All reasons for why this ultra-modern 777 went into a stall, are, however,  pure speculation at this point. There are a thousand things, at least, that can go wrong. However, it is very, very unlikely that one single error or failure caused this crash. It could very well have been a technical/mechanical issue, combined with a serious of misjudgments by the pilots.

I guess the final answer can only be given when the flight and data recorders of MH 370 are found. The only good news is that the water where the plane crashed is not nearly as deep and mountainous as in the Atlantic, where AF 447 went down. And, following all the updates today, it looks like authorities have a pretty good understanding of where to look for the wreck.

To me, this is indeed a very mysterious and disturbing crash. Especially since I'm a big fan of the Boeing 777 and its reliability. We'll soon know who or what was to blame.