On my recent trip to Copenhagen en route Helsinki was on a Finnair Plane. My previous trip 6 months back prior to this was on an Air France plane through Paris. This time around I thought I will take a different plane so did some research and was surprised to find out that Air France does not have a very good safety record.
It is among some of the worst planes around in terms of safety, perhaps due to it 2 crashes within the 10 year time span, out of which, one happened quite recently if you remember. Finnair on the other hand has an unmatched safety record as next year they would be completing 50 years without a single crash or fatal accident. So I decided I was taking the Finnair this time for sure.
I then did some research on the type of air craft that these companies operate within the specified route. Finnair operates Airbus A330 and Air France operates Airbus A340. Air France definitely has a better plane here and more over A340 has 4 engines as compared to 2 engines with Finnair. So I read some reviews on whether the number of engines on a plane has anything to do with how safe a plane is.
Most people seemed to agree that it really did not matter. And moreover one person was of the opinion that if you have four engines, and one of them malfunctions, then you have to do an emergency landing anyway. And the more engines there are the more chances of some sort of failure. The chances of all engines failing are only when perhaps the aircraft hits a big flock of birds, and if that happens, it is no good whatever number of engines you may have. His argument sort of seemed valid at that time. So I decided, two engines are good enough, I don’t need four.
However, I must add here that the food and hospitality on Air France plane was much better than Finnair.
Anyway, on the plane, as always, there is not much to do; so most of the time you just look out of the window. So I made the most of this time clicking photographs and experimenting with the DSLR. I am glad I spent my time wisely, as some of the pictures came out better than I thought.
My earlier trip was quite elaborate, with me visiting Norway on a cruise for 3 days, Paris 2 days, and Switzerland, Berne about a week. But since I did not have a DSLR, I don’t know if I want to share those photographs here. At that time I was using a point and shoot Sony Cybershot. Some photographs were good, but I did not think of composition or anything of that sort while taking those photos. Well, not that I do now. I mean I try my best. Perhaps, I will share a few of them in my later posts.
