Air Travel Safety

We often hear that flying is safer than driving but how do we become sure of it that our flight is the safest when we board the flight.Airline actively monitors the safety of flight and there are dedicated teams that work on identifying the risks and hazards in order to mitigate them before they can cause an accident. Airlines implement the safety management system as advised and enforced by Federal Aviation Administration to promote the positive safety culture.Even though the aviation fatality rates are historical low but there is a need to continue addressing precursors to accidents in order to continue to improve the current level of safety in airspace.A lot of words have been floating around that airlines is no more safe for public.This article will focus on doing a statistical analysis to see whether there are any claims to the fact that aviation is still the best and safest mode of travel.

A look at total distance flown

The average flight distance flown by an airline per week has risen exponentially in recent years that contributed to increased passenger revenue per available seat mile(PRASM).The total distance flown in year 2014 is almost 3 times compared to total distance flown 15 years back. Around 32.6 Billion million km were flown only in North America region on annual basis collectively by United airlines , Delta airlines and American airlines.

Has it been fatal as well?

Although the distance flown has increased exponentially but fatalities count has gone down to a great extent.This is mainly attributed to extensive safety measures taken by operating airline to improve the safety levels. Airlines took strong measures to mitigate risks and hazards including updating fleets, replacing older aircraft or those perceived to be less safe, with newer, more reliable models, expanding operating regions, launching special training programs for pilots to handle emergency situations.Below figure shows the trend of fatality count over the years:

It has been observed that number of miles flown by an airline is an important factor in determining the safety of airline.There are few airlines that travel less but may have more number of fatalities.Similarly there may be few airlines that cover a big distance but may still have less number of fatalities. One of the key performance metric , fatality score, was calculated using the 'miles travelled' field and 'fatalities' field to determine the fatality score per available seat per week.It was used as a bench mark to calculate the safety of airline and it was found that American airlines , Delta airlines and United airlines had negative fatality score(negative = more safer) which proves that US airlines are the safer compared to other airlines that still had less fatalities but more fatality score per unit of distance covered.

Air Vs Road Travel

Data from Bureau of Transportation Statistics containing fatalities for both air and road travel was compared and it was found that road fatalities count is very less compared to aviation fatalities. Moreover , the trend shows that the airline fatality count is going down over years while road fatality count is going up due to increasing population and increased risk on roads. Even a 100 mile road trip has at least an order of magnitude more risk of death compared to flying.

Factors causing incidents

After analyzing all historical crash events involving all the accidents, a statistical report was

prepared that shows that most of our incidents occur near the runway, implying that taking off and landing are the most dangerous parts of the journey. Most fatal accidents happened during 'En-route' and 'post-impact' phase.Few steps needs to be taken in preventing runway overruns and ensuring operators adhere to International Civil Aviation Organization guidelines(ICAO). As we can see from the figure below, the biggest root cause of airplane crashes is 'human_error' and 'weather' followed by 'mechanical failures'.Airline industries can use this data to establish and improve safety standards. Special emphasis should be given to train pilots to handle landing and takeoff situations.As mechanical failure is also a big cause of crashes, the possibilities of engine failures should be mitigated and aircrafts should be regularly maintained and updated so that incidents can be avoided.

Conclusion:

Air travel has proved out to be safest among all modes of transportation. Air travel has caused very less number of fatalities and incidents considering the distance different airlines have travelled in the past. The news spread by media are not justified and facts are often misrepresented in the immediate and continuous coverage.The statistical reports in the article on air crashes do not seem to explain variation in public air travel behavior shift caused by media news. The distorted media reality may have blind spots on real facts. This should not stop people from traveling through air which is still the safest and quickest mode of transportation.