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Given that Southwest Airlines has killed one passenger in its entire history I'm going to say that a methodology that ranks them among the worst in safety is li

by khuey 6y ago

Given that Southwest Airlines has killed one passenger in its entire history I'm going to say that a methodology that ranks them among the worst in safety is likely suspect.

ashtonkem 6y ago
I was going to say, that doesn’t pass the sniff test. Excluding this current incident, PIA has killed 102 passengers and crew since 2000. The most expansive view of Southwest’s record would include 4 fatalities: one passenger, two people on the ground, and another passenger who died of a medical issue while being restrained. One of those ground deaths was because someone walked onto the runway and was hit by a landing 737, so I’m not inclined to blame Southwest for that.
- p_l 6y ago
  Incidents and other things that normal passengers don't hear about a large role in such statistics.
  - ashtonkem 6y ago
    While I agree, one would expect incidents to scale roughly with the rate of fatalities. With PIA having 2 orders of magnitude more fatalities in this century, it would take some pretty extraordinary non-fatality incident statistics to declare that PIA is much safer than Southwest. Also worth considering is fatalities per flight hour. While I couldn’t find accurate flight hours for all the airlines, Southwest has a much larger fleet (752 vs. 31). Combined with a much lower fatality count (arguably 2 vs. 102), this implies that Southwest is much, much safer than PIA. It’s possible that non-fatal incidents can cover that gap, but at a high level analysis this seems implausible.
    - p_l 6y ago
      Checking further, it seems that at least some of the ratings depend on having passed IATA audit, which is voluntary. So a Low Cost immediately loses on that.
- selectodude 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwest_Airlines_Flight_1248 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwest_Airlines_Flight_1248 One of the crazier things I've seen. Really the only fatality a Southwest pilot is responsible for.

by khuey 6y ago

Given that Southwest Airlines has killed one passenger in its entire history I'm going to say that a methodology that ranks them among the worst in safety is likely suspect.

ashtonkem 6y ago

I was going to say, that doesn’t pass the sniff test. Excluding this current incident, PIA has killed 102 passengers and crew since 2000. The most expansive view of Southwest’s record would include 4 fatalities: one passenger, two people on the ground, and another passenger who died of a medical issue while being restrained. One of those ground deaths was because someone walked onto the runway and was hit by a landing 737, so I’m not inclined to blame Southwest for that.

p_l 6y ago
Incidents and other things that normal passengers don't hear about a large role in such statistics.
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  While I agree, one would expect incidents to scale roughly with the rate of fatalities. With PIA having 2 orders of magnitude more fatalities in this century, it would take some pretty extraordinary non-fatality incident statistics to declare that PIA is much safer than Southwest. Also worth considering is fatalities per flight hour. While I couldn’t find accurate flight hours for all the airlines, Southwest has a much larger fleet (752 vs. 31). Combined with a much lower fatality count (arguably 2 vs. 102), this implies that Southwest is much, much safer than PIA. It’s possible that non-fatal incidents can cover that gap, but at a high level analysis this seems implausible.
  - p_l 6y ago
    Checking further, it seems that at least some of the ratings depend on having passed IATA audit, which is voluntary. So a Low Cost immediately loses on that.
selectodude 6y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwest_Airlines_Flight_1248 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwest_Airlines_Flight_1248 One of the crazier things I've seen. Really the only fatality a Southwest pilot is responsible for.