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Is that a lot? Nobody has actually died. Nobody has crashed. US airlines are incredibly safe as a form of transit. An airline flying older planes will have

Is that a lot? Nobody has actually died. Nobody has crashed. US airlines are incredibly safe as a form of transit. An airline flying older planes will have more issues. Someone will always have the most issues. I think it's cheap journalism to call them out without an actual compelling reason to think lives are at risk.

djcapelis 10y ago
They're way outside the expected amount for a US airline. I'm curious what the comparison would look like internationally. But still, part of keeping air travel safe is enforcing safety and maintenance standards. I'm really glad this newspaper wrote this article! It's exactly the type of investigative story I think can be really valuable.
- hodgesrm 10y ago
  The "how we did the story" section at the bottom was great. Nice framing of the problem and corresponding data analysis.
mjevans 10y ago
The thing most major disasters involving human built things have in common is that it is often a series of failures. An 'alignment of the planets' where everything happens to fall in to place and that string of 1-s comes up on the cosmic die to let you die. What this article is covering is how much closer, by a wide margin, Allegiant's running to that result than other airlines in the US.
- gameshot911 10y ago
  The 'alignment of the planets' is known in certain industries as the Swiss cheese model[1]. [1]https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Swiss_cheese_model https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Swiss_cheese_model
  - sqeaky 10y ago
    That is an interesting way to describe "defense in depth" to non-technical people that ought to be easy to understand. Thank you.
- arjie 10y ago
  On certain studied construction sites, it was observed that number of reported incidents correlates negatively with fatality rate. Fig 7.1 on Sidney Dekker's _Field Guide to Understanding Human Error_. I don't have the book any more, but I believe the idea was that emphasizing number of incidents only led to incident suppression.
hodgesrm 10y ago
If you read the article it seems Allegiant MD-80s have problems 2x times more often than American MD-80s and 3x more than Delta MD-80s. Assuming they did the math right it's a concerning apples to apples comparison. Also according to this article Allegiant's emergency landing rate is 10x Southwest, which was accounted safest, and over 2x that of American, which had the highest rate other than Allegiant. Again, seems like a disturbing difference regardless of the airplane involved. Add in the fact that Allegiant's current CEO was the former CEO of ValueJet [1] and this does not seem like a good airline if you want to get home in one piece. They sound like Spanair or Arrow Air. I love aircraft but flying on those two was creepy. They both had serious crashes, as did ValueJet. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_J._Gallagher,_Jr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_J._Gallagher,_Jr.
- kirykl 10y ago
  Wow the landing rate is similar to ValueJet too "The Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA) Atlanta field office sent a memo on February 14, 1996, to Washington, D.C., stating that 'consideration should be given to an immediate FAR 121 re-certification of this airline' - in other words, the FAA wanted ValuJet grounded. ValuJet airplanes made 15 emergency landings in 1994, 57 in 1995, and 57 from January through May 1996." source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ValuJet_Airlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ValuJet_Airlines
dingaling 10y ago
> Is that a lot? Nobody has actually died. Nobody has crashed. "Not killing passengers": that seems a rather primitive metric, which for air transport I think we left behind in the 1950s when turbine engines brought a magnitude leap in reliability and power. Nowadays the primary differentiators amongst ( FAA and JAA-certified ) airlines are punctuality, service, schedule and price. An airline that consistently and significantly fails on one or more of those, as Allegiant appears to be doing, will not last long in the deregulated aviation market. So in that sense it is valuable journalism to bring their poor reliability to light.
CydeWeys 10y ago
> Is that a lot? Nobody has actually died. Nobody has crashed. So we should wait until ~100 people die in a plane crash before addressing the obvious problem? I'm not following your logic at all. Oh, and actually, thousands of people have died in plane crashes before. Just not on this airline (yet). But there's no reason that the same shoddy maintenance practices that killed thousands of people on other airlines can't also kill people on this one.

djcapelis 10y ago

They're way outside the expected amount for a US airline. I'm curious what the comparison would look like internationally. But still, part of keeping air travel safe is enforcing safety and maintenance standards. I'm really glad this newspaper wrote this article! It's exactly the type of investigative story I think can be really valuable.

hodgesrm 10y ago
The "how we did the story" section at the bottom was great. Nice framing of the problem and corresponding data analysis.

mjevans 10y ago

The thing most major disasters involving human built things have in common is that it is often a series of failures. An 'alignment of the planets' where everything happens to fall in to place and that string of 1-s comes up on the cosmic die to let you die. What this article is covering is how much closer, by a wide margin, Allegiant's running to that result than other airlines in the US.

gameshot911 10y ago
The 'alignment of the planets' is known in certain industries as the Swiss cheese model[1]. [1]https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Swiss_cheese_model https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Swiss_cheese_model
- sqeaky 10y ago
  That is an interesting way to describe "defense in depth" to non-technical people that ought to be easy to understand. Thank you.
arjie 10y ago
On certain studied construction sites, it was observed that number of reported incidents correlates negatively with fatality rate. Fig 7.1 on Sidney Dekker's _Field Guide to Understanding Human Error_. I don't have the book any more, but I believe the idea was that emphasizing number of incidents only led to incident suppression.

hodgesrm 10y ago

If you read the article it seems Allegiant MD-80s have problems 2x times more often than American MD-80s and 3x more than Delta MD-80s. Assuming they did the math right it's a concerning apples to apples comparison. Also according to this article Allegiant's emergency landing rate is 10x Southwest, which was accounted safest, and over 2x that of American, which had the highest rate other than Allegiant. Again, seems like a disturbing difference regardless of the airplane involved. Add in the fact that Allegiant's current CEO was the former CEO of ValueJet [1] and this does not seem like a good airline if you want to get home in one piece. They sound like Spanair or Arrow Air. I love aircraft but flying on those two was creepy. They both had serious crashes, as did ValueJet. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_J._Gallagher,_Jr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_J._Gallagher,_Jr.

kirykl 10y ago
Wow the landing rate is similar to ValueJet too "The Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA) Atlanta field office sent a memo on February 14, 1996, to Washington, D.C., stating that 'consideration should be given to an immediate FAR 121 re-certification of this airline' - in other words, the FAA wanted ValuJet grounded. ValuJet airplanes made 15 emergency landings in 1994, 57 in 1995, and 57 from January through May 1996." source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ValuJet_Airlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ValuJet_Airlines

dingaling 10y ago

> Is that a lot? Nobody has actually died. Nobody has crashed. "Not killing passengers": that seems a rather primitive metric, which for air transport I think we left behind in the 1950s when turbine engines brought a magnitude leap in reliability and power. Nowadays the primary differentiators amongst ( FAA and JAA-certified ) airlines are punctuality, service, schedule and price. An airline that consistently and significantly fails on one or more of those, as Allegiant appears to be doing, will not last long in the deregulated aviation market. So in that sense it is valuable journalism to bring their poor reliability to light.

CydeWeys 10y ago

> Is that a lot? Nobody has actually died. Nobody has crashed. So we should wait until ~100 people die in a plane crash before addressing the obvious problem? I'm not following your logic at all. Oh, and actually, thousands of people have died in plane crashes before. Just not on this airline (yet). But there's no reason that the same shoddy maintenance practices that killed thousands of people on other airlines can't also kill people on this one.