Qantas flight makes emergency landing, keeps “safe” record safe
A Qantas flight had to make an emergency landing in Singapore because of engine trouble today, but thankfully all 459 people aboard were safely evacuated. Anytime Qantas is in the news, you can expect people to talk about the so-called perfect record by the airline. Popularized by a quote in the 1988 movie Rain Man in which Dustin Hoffman’s character claims that “Qantas never crashed,”1 many people still believe it to be true today.
The truth? While Qantas has had near misses and emergency landings, it is true that the airline has never had a fatal accident since it began flying major commercial aircrafts. However, when Qantas was involved with the military forces and flying small planes, there were several fatal incidents, the last one occurring in 1951 when an engine propeller failed, causing the plane to crash and killing the seven people aboard the plane.2
So… the official answer to the age old statement is both true and false. Qantas has had fatalities, but not in the modern sense of aircrafts to which we have become accustomed.
Read on:
Reuters.com – Factbox – Qantas, an airline that has never had fatal accident
Yahoo! News – Qantas jumbo makes emergency landing in Singapore
(image above from Wikimedia Commons)
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