Why it matters: Air travel is the one part of American daily life where the general public has zero tolerance for any kind of safety lapse.As we saw so vividly, the aviation industry is far from perfect in that regard. But it's still astonishingly good.
Where it stands: Journalist James Fallows calls air travel's safety record "an under-appreciated miracle of modern society."
Where it stands: Journalist James Fallows calls air travel's safety record "an under-appreciated miracle of modern society."
- "On a statistical basis, being aboard a North American or Western European airliner is about the safest thing you can do with your time," he writes, "compared even with taking a walk or sitting in a chair."
- Writes the NYT's Zeynep Tufekci: "A National Transportation Safety Board investigation report reads like a how-to book for pulling off miracles and achieving seemingly incredible levels of safety. These reports renew one's faith in what humanity can achieve if we apply our brainpower and resources to it."
- A "but" follows, of course: "these exceptional levels of commercial airline safety require eternal vigilance against the usual foes."
Reality check: Nothing remotely similar exists with regard to auto safety. As David Zipper reports for Slate, auto manufacturers such as Tesla self-certify their vehicles as safe, and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration needs to launch and conclude an in-depth investigation before it can intervene and ask for a recall.
Between the lines: Buy-in from the public is crucial. When hundreds of planes were grounded in the wake of the Alaska Airlines incident, causing thousands of flights to be canceled, there were surely grumbles but there was no real opposition, like there was to seatbelt laws or safer streets or mask mandates. No one called loudly for the flights to be reinstated immediately, saying that safety culture had gone too far.
Between the lines: Buy-in from the public is crucial. When hundreds of planes were grounded in the wake of the Alaska Airlines incident, causing thousands of flights to be canceled, there were surely grumbles but there was no real opposition, like there was to seatbelt laws or safer streets or mask mandates. No one called loudly for the flights to be reinstated immediately, saying that safety culture had gone too far.
- Public attitudes toward Boeing track the manufacturer's safety record — unlike, say, attitudes toward Tesla, which has a pretty dismal safety record for both employees and drivers but whose reputation in the public mind is mostly a function of what people think about the company's technology and CEO.
by Felix Salmon, Axios | Read more:
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[ed. Probably because everyone can imagine intuitively what it might be like to fall from 30,000 ft. to their deaths; that's a pretty primal fear, while other more likely forms of accidents seem less visceral. From the links above:]
But they also remind us that, much like liberty, these exceptional levels of commercial airline safety require eternal vigilance against the usual foes: greed, negligence, failure to adapt, complacency, revolving doors at regulatory agencies and so on."
[ed. Probably because everyone can imagine intuitively what it might be like to fall from 30,000 ft. to their deaths; that's a pretty primal fear, while other more likely forms of accidents seem less visceral. From the links above:]
***
"A National Transportation Safety Board investigation report reads like a how-to book for pulling off miracles and achieving seemingly incredible levels of safety. These reports renew one’s faith in what humanity can achieve if we apply our brainpower and resources to it.But they also remind us that, much like liberty, these exceptional levels of commercial airline safety require eternal vigilance against the usual foes: greed, negligence, failure to adapt, complacency, revolving doors at regulatory agencies and so on."
~ The Truth About Airplane Safety (NYT - Zeynep Tufekci)
***
The connecting theme is how to learn from mistakes — as individuals, as companies and organizations, as a larger culture. Today I’ll discuss what happens when individuals and institutions do learn. Next, what happens when they don’t.Summary version: Modern aviation is so incredibly safe because aviation has been so thorough and unsparing about facing and learning from its errors. (...)
A big-picture illustration: Over the past 13-plus years, U.S. airlines have conducted well over ten billion “passenger journeys” — one person making one trip. And in those years, a total of two people, of the ten billion, have died in U.S. airline accidents. For comparison: on average two people in the U.S. die of gunshot wounds every 25 minutes around the clock. And two more die in car crashes every half hour. (Around 45,000 Americans died last year of gunshots, and around 42,000 in car crashes.)
How could the aviation system possibly have managed this? Airplanes weighing close to one million pounds hurtle into the sky, carrying hundreds of passengers who are separated by sheets of aluminum and plastic from air so cold and thin it would kill them quickly on exposure. Passengers gaze out at engines each up to 1/10th as powerful as those that sent Apollo 13 toward the moon. At the end of the journey the pilots bring the plane down on a precise strip of pavement—perhaps 60 seconds after the plane ahead of them in the queue, 60 seconds before the next one. And we take it all for granted—grumbling about the crowds and the hassle and the pretzels and the leg room, but safe.
The origins of this ongoing safety revolution is well chronicled; I spent several chapters on it in my book China Airborne. My point for now involves the aviation world’s relentless, unsparing, de-personalized, and highly systematized insistence on learning from whatever makes the system fail.
~ Learning From Disasters (James Fallows)
