Is air travel safer today than it was 101 days ago?

It has been 100 days since we first broke the news of a missing Malaysia Airlines (MAS) flight MH370 bound for Beijing. Since then 800 million people have flown on commercial airlines.

That’s a staggering 8 million people per day (based on the 2013 figure released by IATA). A quick check on flightradar24.com, shows that around 5,000 aircraft are mid flight, at this very moment. Another quick search, will point out that the odds of one dying in a plane crash is 1:11 million.

These figures are released year after year, often times following an incident involving a commercial flight.

This should be enough to convince us that flying is always a better mode of transportation.

But really, how safe is air travel 100 days after flight MH370 was declared missing? What have we learnt so far?

I want to look at a letter written by the Director General and CEO of IATA, published, around 35 days after ‘the routine’ flight went off radar. Tyler stressed on the importance of the lessons that we can learn from the MH370 incident. He looked at two immediate lessons, following the disappearance of the Boeing 777-200ER;

1. On how we follow aircraft as they move around the globe.

According to Tony Tyler, “In a world where our every move seems to be tracked, there is disbelief that both an aircraft and could simply disappear and that the ‘black box’ is difficult to find.”

He also quoted the ill-fated Air France flight AF447’s black box, that went down in June 2009, was only discovered almost two years later. According to Tyler, while some progress has been made, the aviation industry must accelerate its effort.

“We cannot let another aircraft simply disappear,” stressed Tony.

2. Action is needed in relation to the discovery that stolen passports were used by two passengers.

According to a report by Bloomberg, there are still travelers using stolen passports, even after the 9/11 attacks. Since the formation of the Interpol's Stolen and Lost Travel Documents database in 2002, around 800 million searches per year were conducted when passengers handed their passports to immigration officers at the airports.

Out of these searches, 60,000 are flagged as stolen or lost documents.

To date, according to Interpol, more than 40 million passports are reported missing or stolen. In 2013 alone, more than a billion passengers boarded planes without their travel documents being checked against the database.

It has been 52 days since Tyler’s letter was first published on the IATA website. 520 million people have flown since then. In 2014 IATA expects the number of air travelers to increase to 3.3 billion people.

Have we taken into consideration what Tyler has suggested? If yes, have we implemented these measures to make air travel safer?

It will be years before we find out what happened to the 239 passengers and crew members that disappeared into the darkness. But that should not stop us from implementing and making the changes we need to make sure air travel will be much safer in the very near future.

Consider this; air travel is expected to increase in the Asia Pacific region, reflected by the projected delivery of 13,000 new airplanes over the next twenty years. More people are expected to travel, be it for 'balik kampung' during festive season or to Bali for a weekend escape.

Air travel will be a norm, or as Tyler put it, a ‘routine’.

Next, consider this, a Northwest Airlines Flight 6231 crashed after the pilot failed to turn on the heater to de-ice the pitot tube at the start of the flight. (Aircraft use pitot tubes to measure airspeed.)

In 2009, flight Air France AF447 crashed into the Atlantic Ocean after an erroneous reading of the speed, likely due to ice crystals obstructing the pitot tube.

The Northwest Flight 6231 went down 35 years earlier.

Unless the manufacturers, the airlines and all parties related to the aviation industry, make these changes, take learning seriously, we, as members of the media, will keep writing heartbreaking stories.

Stories of how a daughter believes that her father will one day return from the darkness, after a routine flight.

Consider that.