frontlefthamster;
I did miss your point, thanks.
I would add to the notion that aircraft today make it safer by virtue of their design and reliability, that there are alongside such primary contributions, many other processes which, because they are "normal" to the daily ops are transparent to the operation and crews yet nevertheless are effective in avoiding serious incidents. One example might be an organizational decision to create policies (vice relying upon ops-specs or regs) regarding "Low visibility operations"; who does the approach under what conditions, etc. There are many other such examples.
Safety initiatives such as FOQA/FDM, ASRs, LOSA etc are.... "airy-fairy"?