Happy belated New Year everyone, we’ve made it to 2025. As the famous saying goes, “The sky is the limit”. Physically, humans are only capable of reaching higher depending on their height, their posture, basically the length of their limbs. However, with vehicles we have allowed ourselves to transcend what is humanly possible through artificial means. As enthusiastic as I am about human ingenuity and how the importance of vehicles affects our daily lives, before the end of 2024, four incidents related to planes unfortunately occurred.
A Korean passenger plane, flight 7C2216, crashed on December 29, 2024. The landing gears of the plane did not deploy and in its landing slid on the runway and collided into a concrete wall at the end of the runway, leading to the loss of life of almost everyone on board. A Dutch passenger plane, KLM flight KL1204, had to make an emergency crash landing at Sandjefjord, Norway due to a hydraulic failure. Similarly, a Canadian plane landed in Halifax and experienced a landing gear failure and also experienced a dangerous fire while landing. Finally, a passenger plane from Azerbaijan was shot down by Russia’s air defence missile, killing more than half of the passengers.
In 2024, a massive controversy regarding the Boeing company emerged. What started out as a normal corporate bad decision being revealed turned into a conspiracy and controversy. The Korean passenger plane was manufactured by Boeing. The Dutch plane that made a crash landing was also manufactured by Boeing. Putting the controversy aside, the malfunction of two Boeing planes, one which almost led to the loss of over 100 passengers, and the other malfunction regrettably ending in tragedy, has definitely put Boeing on the pedestal again. The public’s piercing gaze on the company has no doubt doubled, and this has the possibility of instilling fear and the feeling of insecurity in riding a plane manufactured by Boeing.
Despite such terrible occurrences starting early in the year, as well as the forest fires in California, one can do nothing other than only hope and wish that the rest of the year can’t get any worse, expending all tragedies already, and the start of us making our way to the next year is filled with safety, fortune, and good health.