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Thursday, August 26, 2010

China crash runway

A nighttime flight into a remote Chinese city ended with a violent, shaking descent and then a crash near an airport that one major Chinese airline had previously judged unsafe for night landings. More than half the 96 people onboard survived, clambering over luggage as smoke filled the broken fuselage. The crash Tuesday in northeast China's Heilongjiang province killed 42 people and was the country's worst commercial air disaster in nearly six years. Among the dead were a husband-and-wife team of flight attendants, a 12-year-old girl, and midlevel economic development officials on their way to a conference in Yichun, a small city tucked amid boreal forests 90 miles (150 kilometers) from the Russian border. Investigators recovered two black boxes from the wreckage of the Henan Airlines Embraer 190 jet Wednesday and were waiting to question the pilot, Qi Quanjun, who survived but was badly injured, the official Xinhua News Agency reported. Shortly before the crash, Qi told air traffic controllers he saw the runway lights and was preparing to land, Xinhua quoted an Yichun city official as saying. But fog shrouded the airport tucked into a valley, with visibility less than 2,000 feet (600 meters). Survivors described seeing nothing but blackness outside the windows as the plane slammed into grass and fell apart about 1 mile (1.5 kilometers) from the runway at Yichun city's Lindu Airport. The accident underscores the breakneck expansion of China's aviation industry in recent years and the struggles of regulators to keep up. Airports have proliferated as have small regional airlines, reaching into remote cities like Yichun, eager to develop tourism and other businesses to catch up with the country's economic boom.

Why Is Pakistan Not Getting the Aid it Needs?

United Nations General Secretary Ban Ki Moon has called the recent floods in Pakistan the worst humanitarian disaster he has ever witnessed. With more than 20 percent of the country under water, contagious diseases run rampant while the delivery of vital goods and services are all but halted by gushing water and broken roads. While the 1,500 projected dead in Pakistan is a minuscule sum compared to the 100,000 lives lostin the earthquake that ravaged Haiti at the onset of this year, or the 250,000 killed by the South East Asian Tsunami of 2004, exponentially more people are adversely affected by the flood. As cruel as the reality seems, the amount of aid needed cannot be measured in terms of death toll, but in terms of those who continue to live amidst the rubble of their former lives. The plights of those who survive when all around them falls to a state of ruin is especially heart-wrenching, and tuning into such atrocity has not come without a response of great empathy. An outpouring of donations to relief work came from all corners of the world as it watched the aftermath of hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes, and now a catastrophic flood. Still, with such widespread devastation hitting the globe with frightening regularity, the amount that sympathetic souls can give, especially those who are themselves hard-pressed by a recession of epic proportions, is seemingly on the decline. According to data recently compiled by the Guardian, just over $850,000,000 has been donated to Pakistan at the time of writing. Unfortunately, more than half of this amount comes in the way of uncommitted pledges. If this round of relief will follow the patterns seen in the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti, it can be assumed that the majority of unconfirmed aid will never be seen in Pakistan. Even if the total amount offered does come through, it would mean only $42.50 per survivor, a meager sum compared to the average of $1500 per 5 million survivors that resulted from the 7 billion US dollars pledged by state actors alone to aid victims of the tsunami. Much more will be needed in Pakistan, since as the UN has pointed out, in terms of numbers, flooding in Pakistan has affected 2 million more people than the 2004 tsunami, the 2005 Kashmir earthquake, and the 2010 Haiti earthquake combined. But while the game of politics is played, 20 million Pakistanis are desperately trying to stave off the very real threats of starvation and the contraction of contagious diseases such as cholera. Without the estimated $460 million required to meet immediate needs alone, the future bodes only murky prospects for people living in the flooded fifth of Pakistan.