Editorial: You're Safer On An Airplane

By Perry Flint
Air Transport World, October 2008

In an average year, approximately 98,000 Americans die from infections they acquire in hospitals, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Many and perhaps most of these deaths could be avoided if well-understood sanitary methods, such as proper sterilization of equipment and hand-washing, were followed. In addition to the toll from infections, medical mistakes kill 44,000-98,000 each year, states a report from the Institute of Medicine.

We don't know how these death rates measure up on a per capita basis against the health care systems of comparably developed nations. We do know that if we were sitting in the US Congress or the White House, and we were looking at picking the low-hanging fruit in eliminating mistakes and carelessness as a cause of human misery, suffering and death, we would probably want to do all we could to encourage hospitals to adopt things like mandatory standardized pre-operation checklists, incident-reporting systems and data-driven analysis to understand why mistakes occur and how to prevent them.

The air transport industry has been doing this kind of thing for years. That's probably one reason that air travel remains far safer than, say, a trip to the hospital for a routine procedure. Of course you wouldn't know this from watching Congress, which fixates on exceedingly rare breakdowns in aviation but appears not to have the faintest interest in what's happening in the operating room. Consider what occurred last spring after Southwest Airlines--a carrier with an exemplary safety record--was found to have operated 46 737s in violation of an FAA airworthiness directive. Not only were the chairman and CEO hauled in to testify before the cameras, but FAA was browbeaten as well. Under political pressure, FAA's boss, the Dept. of Transportation, created an Independent Review Team to assess the agency's approach to safety regulation. Perhaps reading the Washington tea leaves, FAA already had opened its own special industrywide investigation into airline compliance with airworthiness directives.

Now the verdict is in: US airlines, despite losing billions of dollars this year, are 98% compliant with ADs. And DOT's panel of outside experts essentially validated the collaboration model that has led to a dramatic reduction in US airline accidents, while calling for a more arms' length relationship between airlines and inspectors (see NewsBriefs, p. 11).

No one--outside of Congress--should be surprised at the findings. Consider that as of this writing, more people in Manhattan have died from cranes crashing into their apartments within the past 12 months than in US commercial airline accidents. More people have died from eating tainted hot peppers or injecting contaminated Heparin, from tigers breaking out of the zoo and mauling bystanders, than have died in airline accidents. Throw in crocodile attacks and jellyfish stings and the same statement can be made for Australia, another nation that recently has become fixated on the issue of aviation safety following the Qantas decompression event and a string of lesser incidents.

We don't know how much longer commercial aviation can continue to improve its safety record. There are well-known problem areas--Africa, South America and Russia/CIS--that ICAO and IATA are working hard to rectify. Disaster can strike anytime, as happened in Spain in August and Russia in September, and it is fully possible that before this editorial appears the industry will confront a new tragedy.

Nevertheless, we are fairly comfortable in predicting that grandstanding by politicians in Washington or Canberra (or Brussels) will do little to prevent one. The real safety work is being done in OEM technical labs, in flight simulators and classrooms, in data centers where incidents are recorded for study and in the numerous safety colloquiums and conferences that bring together manufacturers, airlines, airports, ATC, and safety regulators.

If politicians around the world truly wanted to help make aviation safer, they could unlock the purse strings and make some much-needed investment in critical infrastructure. But Congress can't even be bothered to pass a new FAA budget and European air traffic modernization is woefully underfunded.

As Aaron Karp notes in his story beginning on p. 42, excursions are the leading cause of runway accidents and the rate is not going to be changed by bullying airline executives and safety regulators in front of the cameras. It could be helped with more government money for new safety systems in the cockpit and on the ground. But don't hold your breath that will be forthcoming. Politicians around the world seem to take a perverse pleasure in taxing the airline industry but with a few commendable exceptions are remarkably reluctant to give much back.

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