I'm neither a statistician nor a pilot, but I think the author here actually undersells the need to be 100% right in your decision-making. Because the decision

I'm neither a statistician nor a pilot, but I think the author here actually undersells the need to be 100% right in your decision-making. Because the decisions are actually linked together by the fact that they occur on the same flight. If any single decision is a bad one, the whole flight is unsafe. If a pilot makes 50 safety-critical decisions over the course of a single flight, at a 99% success rate, I believe the actual chance of completing the flight without incident is given by 0.99^50, or ~60%. So, 2 out of 5 flights would result in an incident. Of course, the reverse is true, if you know your actual rate of safety-critical incidents to be 1% of your flights, you can calculate how good your decision-making has been by 0.99^(1/50), or said another way: you've made the "safe" decision ~99.97% of the time.