Greatest safety instructions ever

Over the years, I’ve seen quite a few of similar videos, but I think this is the funniest of them all!  Given how seriously airlines take safety, I hope this flight attendant is not fired or punished any other way.  Because, unlike all those regular instructions, people will actually listen to these, and, on top of them, will actually remember…

Überlingen mid-air collision

This accident has recently came up in a conversation I had with a few friends.  Surprisingly, it’s not as widely known as I thought it was.  Read through the Wikipedia page for more details.

The Überlingen mid-air collision occurred at 21:35 UTC on 1 July 2002 between Bashkirian Airlines Flight 2937 (a Tupolev Tu-154M passenger jet carrying 60 passengers – mostly children – and 9 crew) and DHL Flight 611 (a Boeing 757-23APF cargo jet manned by two pilots) over the towns of Überlingen and Owingen in southern Germany. All 71 people on board the two aircraft were killed.

Nearly two years later, on 24 February 2004, Peter Nielsen, the air traffic controller on duty at the time of the accident, was stabbed to death by an architect, Vitaly Kaloyev, who had lost his wife and two children in the accident.

On 19 May 2004, the German Federal Bureau of Aircraft Accidents Investigation (BFU) published its determination that the accident had been caused by shortcomings in the Swiss air traffic control system supervising the flights at the time of the accident and by ambiguities in the use of TCAS, the on-board aircraft collision avoidance system.

This is obviously very tragic, but what a story!  I’ve heard a rumor that there will be a drama movie made about it. That’s in addition to a few documentaries that already exist. Like this one, for example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecbQst17YwU

Cyprus Airways : Why so many pilots?

Cyprus Mail reader asks an interesting question:

Having just read your article on the Cyprus Airways pilots’ legal action against the board, I cannot believe their audacity.

They talk about how the board should remove excess staff. There are 71 pilots for a fleet of six aircraft. That is an amazing amount of pilots for such a small fleet. That is the equivalent of 10 crews per aircraft, when normally an airline would have four, possibly five crews per aircraft, especially with such a small route structure. Why so many pilots?

No wonder the airline cannot make a profit.

I wonder how many people actually know the following:

  • how many aircraft  Cyprus Airways has in its fleet?
  • how many pilots are employed by the Cyprus Airways?
  • how many pilots are usually in one crew?
  • how many crews on average an airline has per aircraft?
  • how does the number of crews per aircraft varies based on the route structure?