NEW YORK — The deadly crash of a TransAsia plane into a river in Taiwan is again focusing the world’s attention on the safety challenges facing fast-growing Asian airlines.
TransAsia has been adding routes rapidly since the Taiwanese carrier went public in 2011. TransAsia and others like it are rushing to keep up with a travel boom driven by the region’s growing middle class.
The ease and increasing affordability of flying helps fuel economic growth and a better lifestyle for Asian consumers. But as airlines carry more passengers across increasingly crowded skies, they are also racing to train enough pilots.
“The demand is almost exceeding the supply,” said John M. Cox, who spent 25 years flying for US Airways and is CEO of consultancy Safety Operating Systems.
Quickly growing airlines need to maintain standards as they hire pilots, maintenance workers, dispatchers and flight attendants. Cox said the Asian carriers are meeting those marks, but it’s a challenge.
TransAsia Airways Flight 235 crashed Wednesday after takeoff from Taipei, Taiwan, with 58 people aboard. Video from a car’s dashboard camera captured the moment that the plane, tilting madly, clipped a bridge before landing in a shallow river. At least 31 were killed.
It was the second fatal accident in just over six months for the airline and its seventh serious accident in the past two decades, according to aerospace publication Flightglobal.
It comes barely a month after one of Indonesian carrier AirAsia’s planes crashed into the Java Sea, killing all 162 aboard.
As Southeast Asia’s economies grow, more people have money to travel and airlines are adding planes to whisk them across the region.
Aircraft manufactures Airbus, ATR, Boeing, Bombardier and Embraer delivered 1,543 new planes to airlines last year. That means 30 planes rolled off their collective assembly lines every week — the fastest production rate in commercial aviation history. Most of those aircraft went to Asia.
TransAsia Airways, Taiwan’s third-biggest airline, has been part of that buying spree. It has added about two dozen routes to mainland China and other Asian cities. TransAsia flies about 20 planes from its base at Taipei’s Sungshan Airport and has enough new aircraft orders to double its fleet within five years.
The turboprop plane that crashed Wednesday was less than a year old, according to Ascend, an aviation consultancy. It is an ATR 72-600, made by a joint venture of Airbus Group and Italy’s Alenia Aermacchi.
Keith McGuire, a former accident investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board, said rapid growth can strain an airline’s pilot training and maintenance, but carriers with good safety and training programs can handle it.
“There is a misconception that just because an airline is new or, they are growing rapidly, therefore they are inherently unsafe. Investigators don’t look at it that way,” he said.
There are 89,000 daily flights around the world, according to flight tracking site FlightAware, including 25,000 in Asia. More than 99.9 percent of those land safely. Still, experts are concerned because of the region’s rapid growth.
For each new plane, airlines need to hire and train at least 10 to 12 pilots, sometimes more, according to industry experts. The figure is so high because planes often fly throughout the day and night, seven days a week, while pilots need sleep and days off.
Boeing projects that the Asia-Pacific region will need 216,000 new pilots in the next 20 years, the most of any region in the world, accounting for 40 percent of the global pilot demand.
To put that in perspective, there are about 104,000 pilots working in the United States, flying everything from crop dusters to jumbo jets, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Asia doesn’t have enough training programs for the pilots it needs, said David Greenberg, a former Delta Air Lines executive. The result, Greenberg said, has been pilot poaching — carriers in the Middle East and Asia have recruited in the U.S., Canada, Australia and Europe to fill their cockpits.
