Looking at the safety reports, I'm seening a trend. The number of aircraft suffering pressurization problems seems higher than usual. Although this hasnt caused any recent accidents, it's still a concern.
The second trend seems to be with Airbuses having smoke or the smell of buring in the cabin. Again this hasnt caused any serious problems (and it does happen to many aircraft types) it's always a bit of a worry.
A fire on board an aircraft is a seriously big problem. Now to be fair the smell of burning can be caused by lots of things, often just hot air from the engine. A real fire on the other hand tends to lead to bad things.
The problem with an aircraft fire is the limited fire fighting supplies, the difficulty in accessing parts of the aircraft in flight, and the effects of fire and smoke on controls and passengers. The answer is to land ASAP.
This is fine if your over a large country with lots of airports, a tad trickier if your over Africa or the ocean. Even the UK only really has a few airports that a large aircraft could land at. And time is the critical factor.
A few minutes has made the difference between life and death.
Now thats not to say Airbusses are less safe than any other aircraft, they actually have a very good safety record, and to be fair none of the recent events has actually been a fire. A far bigger risk is a passengers battery bank going bang, this happens more often than you might think.
Airlines have developed systems for dealing for this issue though, so while it's stilla risk, it's not as big a risk as it used to be.
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