Avoidance of trouble spots a comfort for every air passenger

The flight plan in front of Frank Kane's seat showed a trip over Iraq, until a timely turn eastward.

Air travel seems to have become more dangerous recently, with the disasters that struck Malaysian and other airlines. But the official figures do not bear that impression out.

According to the Aviation Safety Network (ASN), accidents, including hijacking and sabotage, peaked in the late 1970s, just as cheap and convenient air-travel began to grow rapidly. From then on it fell consistently, except for a blip in the early 2000s.

Since then, both incidents and fatalities have fallen dramatically, and this is the safest era to travel by plane since the 1960s, when the ASN began to compile the figures.

That is very reassuring, but I still couldn’t completely shake the worries when I recently sat back in my seat in an Emirates Airbus at Dubai Airport. It was irrational, I know, but the Ukrainian tragedy was still very much on my mind and the flight plan on the chair back screen in front of me seemed to show we would be flying the full length of Iraq, from the south to the troubled north.

That was what the screen showed, and continued to show until some 45 minutes or so into the flight: along the Gulf, heading towards Basra.

Then, in a manoeuvre that prompted an audible sigh of relief from yours truly, the plane took a distinct eastward turn, and it wasn’t long before the coast of Iran came into view. The pilot steered a more-or-less straight line on the Iranian side of the Iraqi border, until the plane reached the point where Iraq ended and Turkey began, where he turned west again.

The rest of the flight was thankfully uneventful. But it’s good to know that Emirates is taking all possible measures to protect passengers’ safety.

Summer break, hectic autumn.

The summer has been a long one, or at least that’s how it has felt this year. With the holy month of Ramadan falling quite early on in the season, many western expats appear to have decided to pack families off at the start of the summer, with the father remaining in the UAE for some weeks.

There must be quite a few mums, dads and kids out there who haven’t seen each other for quite a while.

I know for sure that I’m looking forward to seeing mine again. My wife and child have been in Baku, Azerbaijan for the past couple of weeks (after we got back from a family holiday in Ireland) and while it’s nice to have the place to yourself for a while, it will be good to have them back.

Most schools begin back in Dubai in the next fortnight, and certainly by the first week in September things will be getting back to normal.

I am anticipating a hectic second half of the year in Dubai and Abu Dhabi business, for a few reasons.

First, there are so many companies planning and expecting to come to stock markets in the second half of the year, that even if only a small number of the offerings come off, that will constitute a big increase in regional IPO activity.

Second, it is the 10th anniversary of the Dubai International Financial Centre in November, and this will attract a big and influential global crowd this year, as it coincides with Dubai as the venue for the World Economic Forum’s annual pre-Davos agenda-setting meetings in the emirate.

And finally, the Abu Dhabi Global Market, the capital’s planned financial free zone, seems to be building up to a raft of announcements in the autumn as it gears up for formal opening.

It’s going to be a busy few months.

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