Closeness of crashes coincidental, experts say
The crash of a TransAsia Airways turboprop in Taiwan comes six days after the tragedy July 17 involving Malaysia Airlines Flight 17.
Then, one week after the tragedy of MH 17, an Air Alegerie jet carrying 116 passengers disappeared while en route to Algiers from Burkina Faso. At this time, no one knows what happened to that plane.
Although the crashes may have come a few days apart, industry experts say that's nothing more than a coincidence.
"Air travel remains safe," Henry Harteveldt, aviation and travel industry analyst at Atmosphere Research Group in San Francisco said Wednesday after the TransAsia crash. "The facts show it is safer than any other form of transportation."
"Unfortunately, we just had two terrible, unrelated aviation accidents occur," Harteveldt says. "Obviously, the Malaysian plane was shot out of the sky, and the TransAsia incident was an incident where the airplane crashed in bad weather. These are two unrelated events."
On Thursday, Harteveldt called the Air Alegerie disappearance another "unfortunate coincidence," noting reports of bad weather around the crash.
Jon Beatty, Flight Safety Foundation President and CEO, agreed.
"Commercial aviation has reached incredible levels of safety in the past decades, but we still see occasional accidents or incidents such as these," Beatty said. "These are tragedies, but commercial aviation is still extremely safe."
Though crashes of commercial passenger planes have become rare, it's not unprecedented for them to occur within a short time period.
Two commercial passenger planes crashed within days of each other in December 2012. A Fokker 100 flying for Burma-based Air Bagan crash-landed in Burma, also known as Myanmar, on Dec. 25, killing one passenger and a person on the ground, according to The Aviation Herald.
On Dec. 29, a repositioning flight on a Tupelov Tu-204 flying for Russian carrier Red Wings Airlines overran a runway in Moscow. Five of the eight crewmembers were killed, according RT.com.
Passenger planes flying regularly scheduled airline flights crashed within the same week in 2011. A flight for Hewa Bora Airways, based in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, crashed in that country July 8. On July 11, a flight on Russian carrier Angara Airlines ditched in Russia's Ob River after an engine caught fire, The Aviation Herald reported. On July 16, a flight on Brazilian carrier Noar Linhas Aereas crashed after takeoff from Recife.