Knoxville — A Knoxville veteran pilot says flying is still one of the safest ways to travel amid recent reports about Allegiant Air's safety record and the death of a New Mexico mother on a Southwest flight that blew an engine.
"I would go tomorrow and I would put my grandchildren on a Southwest Airlines flight," Mike Copeland said. "I would put my children on an Allegiant flight."
He's logged thousands of hours as a commercial pilot and as part of the U.S. Air Force.
He even lost an engine once — the same problem a Southwest Airlines flight saw Tuesday that resulted in a woman's death.
"It was such a non-event that we actually flew from Denver all the way back to Goldsboro, North Carolina," Copeland said.
He says redundancies are the key to airplane safety.
"I think when you take a look at the redundancies and the skills of the pilots, you normally have a good outcome," Copeland said.
So if a part in the airplane fails, there's usually a backup.
"You take that particular engine in that Southwest plane, those engines usually, those things will go 30,000 hours even between overhauls because they're so reliable," Copeland said.
But when they do breakdown, investigators make sure whatever went wrong gets corrected.
"They're actually taking the engine and they're sending it off to laboratories. ... Was it a fatigue problem in that metal?" Copeland said.
In this case, Copeland believes they'll probably be looking at the containment ring around the engine.
"That containment ring is supposed to prevent any of that material from going into the side of the airplane," Copeland said. "Needless to say, that failed."
But Copeland said even when something like this happens, the pilot and crew are highly trained to keep everyone safe.
"The few times that I've had incidents in flight, that you just kind of, just really, go into that mode," he said.
Copeland said each year, pilots go through simulations where flights go wrong--engine failures, flap failures or maybe electrical fires.
He said it probably won't happen to you, but if it does, you'll be in good hands.