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Luxembourg pilot says social media fuels incident awareness

Recent technical incidents in civil aviation are not a sign of declining safety but a result of increased visibility in the digital age, according to a leading pilots’ representative in Luxembourg.

In recent days, several technical incidents in civil aviation have prompted public discussion in Luxembourg.

On Monday evening, Luxair announced that one of its aircraft had to make an unscheduled landing due to a crack in the cockpit windscreen. According to Dirk Becker, a pilot and General Secretary of the Luxembourg Airline Pilots’ Association, such incidents should be viewed as coincidental. “There are no signs that suggest a warning signal – neither for a specific airline nor a specific type of aircraft,” Becker stated.

Becker does not share the subjective impression that technical failures are becoming more frequent. Instead, he attributes heightened awareness to how information spreads in the digital age.
“We live in the age of social media,” he noted, pointing out that air traffic can now be tracked in near real-time. As a result, even minor incidents are quickly reported, commented on, and shared online.
This increased visibility, he explained, does not reflect a decline in safety standards. To pilots, the recently reported issues are part of routine flight operations. Technical faults can occur at any time, Becker said, with periods of quiet followed by clusters of events. “You have to look at it over very long periods,” he emphasised.

Also today

• Lycée Robert Schuman has issued a warning to parents and students following a troubling wave of bathroom vandalism linked to social media challenges in Luxembourg’s secondary schools.
• The US is to scrap the cornerstone of their climate regulation this week, when reversing the so-called Endangerment Finding of 2009.
• Luxembourg has fallen three spots to 8th place in Transparency International’s 2025 Corruption Perceptions Index, a decline that mirrors a record-low global average and backsliding in several established democracies.
• With another cold snap forecast for Luxembourg, the government has defended its continued reliance on road salt for de-icing, citing a lack of viable alternatives and asserting that environmental impacts remain within safe limits.
• A new study has calculated that Luxembourg spent at least €10.5 billion on housing market interventions from 2010 to 2024, with the vast majority going toward tax incentives rather than affordable housing.
• EU lawmakers have voted in favour of two amendments to an annual report on the Europe for a digital euro, a project that has split the bloc but has gained greater urgency as Europe seeks to bolster its financial sovereignty.
• A mobile aquatic centre adopted by France’s northeastern Moselle region is bringing crucial swimming classes to towns and villages that lack pool facilities.

On air

Lots of cinema talk today and we’ve learned that January is historically a very lean month - by design - in terms of films, but things should be picking up now!

Figure of the day

A new study has calculated that Luxembourg spent at least €10.5 billion on housing market interventions from 2010 to 2024

• It is often claimed, though rarely with concrete figures, that Luxembourg’s housing policy has relied heavily on tax incentives. A recent study now provides a first estimate of the financial scale of these measures between 2010 and 2024.
• Accounting for spending on affordable housing, direct household subsidies, and tax expenditures, they arrived at a total of €10.5 billion – a figure the authors describe as a conservative baseline. “Knowing exactly how many billions of euros public authorities in Luxembourg have spent […] is an impossible task,” they note, citing the large number of actors and types of aid involved.

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