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It's hard to imagine how safe US passenger airlines have become. From the start of 2002 to now, there have been only 115 airliner fatalities in the US. That's 8
by danielvf 12y ago
It's hard to imagine how safe US passenger airlines have become. From the start of 2002 to now, there have been only 115 airliner fatalities in the US. That's 8.7 deaths per year. That's one death per 68,965,517,241 airline passenger miles flown.
It's an incredible human achievement.
I make a hobby of reading through NTSB avaition an maritime accident reports. It's a fascinating look at how to create almost failure free systems out of mechanical things that break and humans that do stupid things.
- dominotw 12y agoReminds me of the famous line, you have a higher chance of getting killed on the way to the airport than on the plane.
- eru 12y agoEspecially if you drive there. Taking the train to the airport is pretty safe, too. (Planes are safer by the metre, trains safer by the second.)
- mikeash 12y agoAn interesting facet of this is that even though the death rate is extremely low, the authorities still want to get it to zero. And it's becoming really hard, because failures are no longer happening often enough to be able to analyze them properly.
- AndrewKemendo 12y agoExponentially harder it would seem and with less and less feedback, my guess is that the numbers will oscillate around some local minimum until there is a paradigm shift in travel technology.
- eevilspock 12y agoBut the effort is what is makes it this low. The alternative is complacency, and the associated slide backwards.
- csours 12y agoI'm sure it is more difficult, but you should be able to measure significant non-fatal events. For instance hospitals (and some industries) measure sentinel events [1][2]. Sentinel events cause death or serious permanent injury, or events that could cause death or serious permanent injury. 1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinel_event http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinel_event 2: I couldn't find a reference for industry, but I know they are recorded because I went through the training.
- mikeyouse 12y agoThe US instituted what's called the 'Aviation Safety Reporting System' in the mid-1970s, which is a program administered by NASA. Any airline employee can file confidential reports about near-misses or other safety issues to an independent party, which then analyzes and aggregates the info to make safety changes. I think it's a large part of why the US airline industry has become so much safer over time. Having a lower-bound number for altitude overshoots or communication problems is immensely useful for policy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_Safety_Reporting_System http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_Safety_Reporting_Syste...
- kjs3 12y agoI think it's a large part of why the US airline industry has become so much safer over time. Programs like this are why much of the worlds airlines are safer. It's not a US only thing.
- cmurf 12y agoThe general ASRS reporting form can be filled out by almost anyone, not just an airline employee. Most typically it's pilots, including general aviation pilots.
- BurningFrog 12y agoRational decisions are made when you weigh costs against benefits. This sounds like focusing only on benefits and ignoring costs. That rarely leads to good overall outcomes. This is a very useful mental error to be able to spot. A very common argument is "X has a clear benefit, so we should do it!". The benefit is absolutely real, but you also need to look at the costs to make a good decision. Another failure mode is risk aversion. If the FDA approves something that turns out to kill 1000 people, they get in much worse media and political trouble than if they don't approve something that would have saved 1,000,000 lives. So they focus hard on costs and less on benefits.
- BurningFrog 12y agoThis sounds weird, but that probably means too much effort and resources are being spent on improving air travel security. One way to think about it is that those resources could save 100 times more lives per dollar in other areas.
- pascal_cuoq 12y agoYou cannot state that without saying how much is spent per passenger or per mile traveled and the marginal cost in lives of a dollar saved there. A similar line of reasoning would be “In this developed country that I live in, no one dies from being poisoned by tap water. I oppose this massive overspend on making tap water potable! The resources used to reach this absolute would certainly save more lives per dollar elsewhere”. How much would we save my making tap water less potable? What would be the consequences if we did? Sometimes, absolute safety or near-absolute-safety is within reach and is the sweet spot for smart engineering.
- astrobe_ 12y agoIt actually serves two purposes: protect the passengers, and protect people on the ground (one can think of 9/11 although it's a very special case).
- kjs3 12y agoOne way to think about it is that those resources could save 100 times more lives per dollar in other areas. There is precisely no objective reason to believe that at face value.
- parados 12y agoSince few accidents happen in the cruise the more useful measure is fatal accidents/1m departures rather than hours or miles. In 2013 it was 0.16/1m departures for jet airliners[1]. If you took two flights a day it would be, on average, 8,200 years before you were involved in a fatal accident and you would have a 80+% chance of surviving that. [1] http://www.boeing.com/news/techissues/pdf/statsum.pdf http://www.boeing.com/news/techissues/pdf/statsum.pdf
- sukilot 12y agoIs per capita average the right measure? My well being depends not only on my survival, but also my immediate family and close friends... Flying is still pretty safe, but we shouldn't understate the impact weighted risk of activities.
- dhimes 12y ago8,200 years before you were involved in a FATAL accident and you would have a 80+% chance of SURVIVING that (All caps emphasis mine) Is this (fatal/survive) a typo, or does it mean you could survive where some passengers don't?
- danielvf 12y agoA fatal aircraft accident is one with a death. But most "fatal" airline crashes have only a few deaths. Take the recent AsianAir crash in San Franciso. It was a "fatal" crash, but only four of the three hundred some people on the aircraft died.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- Retric 12y agoYour not including general avaiation numbers. Just 2010 had 267 fatal accidents and 453 deaths, though the trend looks good. http://www.aopa.org/About-AOPA/General-Aviation-Statistics/General-Aviation-Safety-Record-Current-and-Historic http://www.aopa.org/About-AOPA/General-Aviation-Statistics/G...
- smackfu 12y agoGeneral aviation crashes tend to have completely different causes than airliner accidents. Pilot error and maintenance issues are the biggies.
- CPLX 12y agoThose are the two that tend to get the airliners too honest. Either the machine fails or the person flying it does. If you want to get technical about it nearly all plane fatalities are caused by a lack of altitude, but that's a different story.
- alistairSH 12y agoIsn't that a bit like auto accidents vs motorcycle accidents? Although closely related, one mode of transport is inherently more dangerous. And that more dangerous mode is only used by a small subset of the population.
- bentcorner 12y agoI think it's more like the difference between taking a bus vs driving yourself.
- kjs3 12y agoOr semi vs passenger car.
- bane 12y agoYeah it's absolutely amazing. Because there's so few accidents now, and so few that need serious professional NTSB analysis on, I've heard the FAA is trying to turn to self-reporting on accidents to help build out the picture of aircraft failure modes. They've apparently established a complex system of self-reporting combined with deidentification in order to encourage people to provide data. http://www.asias.faa.gov/pls/apex/f?p=100:43:0::NO::P43_REGION_VAR:1 http://www.asias.faa.gov/pls/apex/f?p=100:43:0::NO::P43_REGI...
- nkurz 12y agoIt's a fascinating look at how to create almost failure free systems out of mechanical things that break and humans that do stupid things. Normal Accidents by Charles Perrow is a great book on the topic of how to put together complex systems that are forgiving of user error: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_Accidents http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_Accidents Here's a summary: http://users.ox.ac.uk/~kell0956/docs/systemic_failures_1.pdf http://users.ox.ac.uk/~kell0956/docs/systemic_failures_1.pdf The book uses airline safety as one of its primary examples. Here's an article applying it to a previous aircraft disaster: http://boingboing.net/2011/12/08/disaster-book-club-what-you-n.html http://boingboing.net/2011/12/08/disaster-book-club-what-you...
- kjs3 12y agoIt's hard to imagine how safe US passenger airlines have become. Um...the EU and much of Asian is doing pretty good as well.