A flight from Düsseldorf to Venice encountered problems on approach, forcing passengers to don life vests. The plane was experiencing problems with its landing gear.
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As flight AB-8766 from Düsseldorf to Venice approached Marco Polo Airport, a landing gear error was reported in the cockpit, the German news weekly Focus reported on Tuesday. The plane's two pilots aborted the planned landing and ordered their 34 passengers to put on life jackets and to sit close to the exits,
The airport sits on the shores of the Adriatic Sea, meaning that failed landings could result in watery endings.
"For the passengers it is certainly a higher-adrenaline situation if they have to put on their life jackets," a spokesman for Air Berlin told the North Rhine-Westphalia news portal Der Westen.
"It was because the Venice airport is surrounded by water," he said. "That precaution would not be needed for a landing in Dusseldorf or Berlin."
The plane reportedly circled the airport for about 40 minutes as pilots attempted to solve the landing gear problem.
The airport's air traffic control tower visually inspected the landing gear on the Bombardier Dash 8 while it was circling and determined that the equipment was in working order.
"There was no time on board for panic or unrest," the Air Berlin spokesman told Der Westen, adding that the airline would rather take precautions even if it meant making the passengers nervous.
The Aviation Herald, which reports on flight incidents around the world, first covered the incident.
"The aircraft climbed to 3,000, later 5,000 feet (1,524 meters) and entered a hold for about 40 minutes while the crew was working the checklists and attempting to resolve the issue," the aviation site reported.
The site also reported that the cabin crew performed a safety briefing preparing the cabin for a possible emergency landing.
The aircraft reportedly remained grounded for about 14 hours before it returned to Düsseldorf and was still out of service 24 hours after the incident.
Ranking of the world's safest/unsafest airlines
Which of the world's 60 biggest airlines is the safest? Based on 2016 air safety data, Germany's JACDEC institute has compiled a ranking of carriers, showing that humans are still the biggest risk factor in air traffic.
Image: Reuters/E. Su
Unsafe China Airlines
About 3.7 billion passengers traveled by plane in 2016. Those who chose China Airlines as their carrier subjected themselves to the biggest risk, because the Taiwanese airline came in at the bottom of JACDEC's list of 60 globally operating carriers.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/D. Chang
Colombia's Avianca no alternative
The ranking was compiled on the basis of national air safety reports of the past 30 years. It measured the number of casualties and crashes against the airlines' traveled kilometers and passenger numbers. An airline without any loss of life and planes is given an index of zero to 0,001 points. Colombia's Avianca scored a value of 0.914 - the second-worst in 2016.
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High crash risk in Indonesia, too
Traveling with Garuda Indonesia - the third-worst performer on a score of 0.770 - isn't to be recommended either. Since its founding in 1950, the airline has reported 47 accidents - 22 of which have led to a total of 583 casualties.
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Ranking unbalanced?
But JACDEC's ranking has been criticized for not separately counting technical defects, human errors, weather incidents and terrorist attacks as reasons for plane crashes. Terrorism, for example, is really an airport safety problem; it accounts for 10 percent of accidents. Simon Ashley Bennett, an air safety expert at Leicester University, says a terror attack on a plane is as unlikely as...
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Bad weather
... an incident of freak weather leading to an accident. Latest data say that 10 percent of them can be attributed to snow, ice, fog and storms. Lightning isn't as dangerous as many believe. More prone to cause crashes are...
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Technology glitches
Today's modern aircraft brim with technology. Small wonder then that technical defects account for about 20 percent of accidents, says Bennett, surpassed only by the biggest cause...
Image: Getty Images/AFP/J. Eisele
The human factor
Airline pilots are the biggest risk factor - they cause half of all accidents these days. Interaction between human beings and ever more complicated machines is prone to lead to mistakes, with the pilot always held accountable if something goes wrong.
Image: picture alliance/ROPI
Masters in the air
Yet, the 2009 crash landing in the Hudson River by Chesley Sullenberger shows that humans' piloting skills are not obsolete in modern aviation. Sullenberger's feat was only the third crash landing on water without casualties. All 155 passengers survived.
Image: picture-alliance/AP Photo/S. Day
Scrap heap or repair?
Strangely enough, an aircraft that has been repaired after a crash gives an airline a better score with JACDEC than one that has been scrapped. Not a few experts question whether such a plane is really safe anymore.
Image: Reuters
More ambiguities
Further reason for criticism comes from the fact that an airline taken over by a rival has its score set back to zero by JACDEC. Lauda Air's 1991 crash with more than 200 casualties (see picture), for example, didn't affect the score of Austrian Airlines, which bought Lauda in 2004. Newly-founded airlines also start with zero points.
Image: picture alliance/dpa
And the winner is...
Hongkong-based Cathay Pacific was the safest airline in 2016, according to the rankiing of the Hamburg, Germany-based institute. Runners-up were Air New Zealand and China's Hainan Airlines. Germany's flagship carrier, Lufthansa, landed in 12th place. On balance, 2016 was among the years with the fewest accidents in aviation history.
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Safer but deadly, too
Last year, JACDEC counted 321 deaths from plane crashes. But the Aviation Safety Network counted four deaths more due to a different inventory method. By far the worst aviation accident was that of a Bolivian charter flight carried out by LaMia, which crashed near Medellin, killing 71 people - among them almost the entire player roster of Brazilian football club AF Chapecoense.