Air Asia flight QZ8501, en route from Surabaya in Indonesia to Singapore, vanished with 162 people aboard a few weeks. This is the third such disaster which has happened in the last few months of aviation history.
Before that we witnessed Malaysian Airline plane, flight No MH 17, which was a scheduled international flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, and was shot down killing all 298 passengers who were on board, while their flight No MH 370 (which was en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing) is missing even today with no trace of any survivors.
It is distrubing to know that air travel now-a-days is not as safe as it used to be.
We non-residential Gujaratis (NRGs) and NRIs travel from London to Bombay or London to Dar-es-Salaam to see our friends and relatives. These incidents will now put us off from frequenting our former places of abode.
We also make extensive use of air trvel to go on holidays. But then there are hundreds if not thousands of planes which dot the sky every day and a few incidents like these should not deter us from flying. I remember the good old days when we used to travel from Dar-es-Salaam to Bombay by ship. We would take coconuts with us to offer them to appease the sea Gods when crossing the rough waters at mid sea. Should we now revert to that practice and offer coconuts to the air-Gods?
Dinesh Sheth
Newbury Park, Ilford
