On 25 July 2000, an Air France Concorde bound for New York crashed in flames shortly after takeoff from Charles de Gaulle Airport outside Paris killing all its passengers. Officials were quick to point out that the crash was the first of a Concorde since the supersonic plane went into commercial operation in 1976. But the Concorde has been flown much less than, say, the Boeing 747. Further, there have been quite a few troubles with the Concorde in the past. For example, between 1979 and 1981, on four separate occasions, tyres blew out as the planes were taking off. Due to the high stresses from supersonic flight, on several occasions sections of the tail have fallen off. Over the last 15 years, there have been at least four emergency landings.
A week prior to that, on 17 July, a Boeing 737 belonging to Alliance Air crashed in flames into an apartment block near Patna airport. Though tragic, this crash doesn´t come as a big surprise given the poor record of air safety India has. In the 1990s alone, there were at least three major civilian air crashes. India´s Comptroller and Auditor General reported in 1997 that there had been 187 accidents and 2729 incidents involving Indian Air Force (IAF) aircraft between April 1991 and March 1997, resulting in the loss of 147 airplanes and 63 pilots.
Such aircraft accidents have obviously prompted increased attention to safety, leading to design improvements and safety features. Nevertheless, accidents have continued. In studying the safety of airplanes and other hazardous technologies, several sociologists and organisation theorists have come to a pessimistic conclusion: serious accidents are inevitable with complex, high-technology systems.
Charles Perrow of Yale University, who coined the term 'normal accidents' to describe such accidents, identifies two structural features of many hazardous technologies — 'interactive complexity' and 'tight coupling' — which make them highly accident-prone regardless of the intent of their operators. According to Perrow, 'complex interactions are those of unfamiliar sequences, or unplanned and unexpected consequences, and either not visible or not immediately comprehensible'. Tight coupling means that 'there is no slack or buffer or give between two items; what happens in one directly affects what happens in the other'.