Paris:
Airplanes today are designed to withstand rough weather conditions and have multiple backups for all kinds of technical failures.
The French Pilots Union say that pilots manage to come out easily out of situations that seem fatal to the lay person and while air crashes like the recent one are terrifying, yet flying remains the safest mode of transport today.
According to the Civil Aviation Organisation, of nearly two and a half million passengers, there were as many as 2758 deaths from air accidents in 1996, but much fewer - 519 in 2008.
Twenty years ago, there was one crash for every five hundred thousand flights and this year recorded one crash for two and a half million safe flights.
Progress made by aeronautics makes flying safest mode of transport today.
The director of the French Pilot Union spells out a whole list of terrifying scenarios that pilots are well trained to tackle.
"We experience a lot of scenarios which could sound very dangerous to you.If you have wrong indication, if you have engine fire, if you have 2 engines shutdown, if you have depressurization, explosive depressurization, you are trained for that. If you have incapacitation of the other pilot you are trained for that. We have many many cases for which we are trained - you have bad weather, you may have a conflict with another aircraft. There are many possibilities that we are training to tackle," says Julien Gourguechon, International Director, French Pilots Union.
But emergency sea landing is perhaps the one scenario for which both pilots and aircrafts are not really so well equipped.