Irish Examiner view: Split-second timing keeps our skies safe
Recent crashes in the US and potentially dangerous incidents here at home serve to remind us that air travel carries risks.
Reports of a mid-air near miss over Cork Airport during last summer’s peak holiday season serve as a reminder of just how busy our skies are, and how we are often oblivious to this fact and its potential consequences.
A glance at one of the airline tracking apps can quickly evaporate our sense of isolation up in the clouds which is, perhaps, why so many of us prefer not to know and settle down, instead, for a stress-free flight. But that is not the same as being kept in permanent ignorance and questioning why public details are only now emerging, six months later, through leaked accounts, about an incident involving a Ryanair Boeing 737 heading for Manchester and a Cessna plane on a training flight from Waterford on July 26 last year.
Both flights were cleared for take-off by air traffic control within two minutes of each other on intersecting runways at Cork Airport. A potential for collision was averted when the four-seater C-172 executed a hard right to take it away from the passenger jet.
Although investigations are ongoing, and could take up to one year, some reports suggest the aircraft were less than 30m apart, an incident which has been logged as a “loss of separation” by the Air Accident Investigation Unit. This would breach international rules which specify minimum safe distances.
This news emerges in a week where there has been major focus on safety following allegations from US president Donald Trump that the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programmes of his predecessors contributed to making the skies less safe after the Potomac disaster when an army Black Hawk helicopter flew into a commercial jet with the loss of 67 lives.
DEI is a set of policies, adopted by many corporations, which encourages workplace representation and participation of people of different genders, races, ethnicities, religions, ages, sexual orientations, disabilities, and classes.
Mr Trump, who has produced no evidence, says that this has made standards more lax.
While there is nothing of that sort at play in the Cork incident, speculation is limited by a general rule of omerta which applies to such occurrences until an official report is issued.
The operator of the C-172 flight, the Atlantic Flight Training Academy, said it was precluded from comment and pointed out the air industry operated under a ‘just culture’ philosophy.
This is another set of operational principles which has become prominent since the late 1990s, gaining currency within aviation, medicine, and the industrial world. The objective of ‘just culture’ is to ensure focus on what happens when things go wrong rather than making the allocation of blame the prime objective.
Airlines, operating in an environment where customer confidence in safety is paramount, face a series of fine judgements about sharing information.
One of the striking moments in recent documentaries and dramas about the Lockerbie disaster was when it became apparent that government officials and their staff based overseas were provided with security warnings that were not on offer to the general public.
Hindsight might conclude that it is always best to over-compensate on disclosure when it relates to retaining the trust of the customer.
Notwithstanding that, we are all well-served by reminders that air travel carries risks. Observing the number of passengers who routinely ignore pre-flight safety demonstrations, this can’t be stated too frequently.
There’s not a minister or aspiring politician unfamiliar with that old expression about “making a rod for your own back”.
Arguably, there’s no heavier cudgel for Irish politicians in 2025 than setting a target for domestic home completions, a topic at the top of people’s concerns according to the latest opinion polls, with dissatisfaction growing in strength.
It’s easy to understand, therefore, why Taoiseach Micheál Martin is chary about committing to new targets, preferring instead to offer a gingering-up talk to the private sector about their responsibilities in delivering much-needed housing.
Developers might be quick to point to several large schemes which have been refused planning or have gone into deep freeze because investment in necessary infrastructure has never taken place. But when voters assess accountability for the ongoing mismatch between supply and demand, it is to the political parties that they will look.
It is valuable that those who made bullish claims last year are predominantly still in power to answer for the failures in their estimates.
The total 30,330 new homes built in 2024, some way short of the 40,000 headlined by Simon Harris and Darragh O’Brien before he moved, perhaps with some sense of relief, to Transport, Climate, Environment, and Energy. At least in his new portfolio he will have to account for unachievable promises made by others rather than optimistic commitments on which his own fingerprints can be found.
Rather than focus on setting a new benchmark, the Taoiseach, speaking in Cork before the weekend, preferred to concentrate on the “very significant commencements last year”. The challenge is to realise those completions, he added.
Another form of challenge will be to explain why they are late, and to separate them from an end-of-year forecast which makes more of a dent in the waiting lists. To have finished fewer dwellings in 2024 than 2023 was a sorry business indeed.
The new minister, James Browne, has his work cut out to explain how the Government will catch up. Upon its ability to do so may rest a number of political futures.
This is not the first time that the US has been keen on protectionism as an arm of foreign policy. But the precedents are not encouraging.
High tariffs were first introduced after the American Civil War but they reached their apogee in the decade after the end of the First World War.
International trade and economic co-operation was severely hindered. Markets became volatile. European countries could not export across the Atlantic to earn dollars to service their war debts.
We know how that ended. Poet WH Auden was sitting in a “dive on 52nd St” on September 1, 1939, “as the clever hopes expire of a low dishonest decade”.
US president Donald Trump’s wide-ranging tariffs against Canada, Mexico, and China are due to be implemented at 12.01am Eastern time tomorrow. It will be “a shot heard around the world”.
Europe will be the next target.
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